It's clearly not a software freedom issue, it's about privacy (which is also
important).
That being said I'm not a big fan of judging companies soley on their names
and reputations, like
"Don't use google, it's bad! Let's switch all to XYZ"
A year later: "Since we all switched to XYZ, it became really big and now
also stores our data... let's switch to ABC"
I personally think it's wise not to trust any company to the extent possible,
since they might all store and sell our data.
It's better to use VPN / Tor and keep our information scattered, not
centralized at the servers of one big corporation - no matter how this
company is called.
Google can't be trusted and does a lot of bad things, but I don't see a
problem using their search engine via VPN (and without being logged in) from
a user point of view.
How is using startpage better? They also get their results from google.
googles technical monopoly on the search engine market is of course a huge
issue, but it's a completely different topic.
