When I switched, about a year and a half ago, I felt like I was switching to a lesser quality search engine (it was an ethical choice and done because I can), that, however, gradually and constantly got better, whereas Google went the opposite path.
Nowdays I only really use Google to leech bandwidth off their maps services. Despite there being a very good alternative available, OpenStreetMaps, they unfortunately appear to have limited (or at least, way less than Google) bandwidth at their disposal... A pity though, because their maps are so awesome, the bicycle map layer with elevation lines is any boy scout's wet dream... but yeah, to find the next hairdresser, Google'll do.
Speaking of bandwidth and OSM reminds me, is there an "SETI-but-for-bandwidth-not-CPU-cycles" kind of thing one could help out with? Like a torrent for map data?
EDIT: Maybe their bandwidth problems are also more the result of a different philosophy about these things. OSM is likely "Download your own offline copy, save everybody's bandwidth and resources" (highly recommended for smartphones, especially in bandwidth-poor Germany) whereas Google is "I don't care about bandwith, your data is worth it".
OSM used to have tiles@home, a distributed map rendering stack, but that shut down in 2012. There is currently no OSM torrent distribution system, but I'd like to set that up.