You are trying to take that away. I have cut every vestige of every one of these companies out of my life except google, which the only thing I have left is, when someone sends me a link to a website owned by them, I pipe through a proxy and rip the content. I want it to be all or nothing, and I've gone to great lengths to make it so, but a video is a video and a video host is a video host in my mind, for purposes of consumption.
FYI I have created a tool to break this dependency also, https://codeberg.org/mister_monster/YouTube2Peertube it enables the content on YouTube to be mirrored elsewhere, and a good number of people use it, but not near enough.
As far as search goes, the truth is I find myself using search less and less in general, because it is mostly broken, but when I do I default to independent indexes like marginilia, brave (which isn't 100% independent yet), even yandex sometimes, but find myself sometimes using a metasearch engine like ddg or metager and so in that way one step removed I do use google search every so often.
FYI I have created a tool to break this dependency also, https://codeberg.org/mister_monster/YouTube2Peertube it enables the content on YouTube to be mirrored elsewhere, and a good number of people use it, but not near enough.
As far as search goes, the truth is I find myself using search less and less in general, because it is mostly broken, but when I do I default to independent indexes like marginilia, brave (which isn't 100% independent yet), even yandex sometimes, but find myself sometimes using a metasearch engine like ddg or metager and so in that way one step removed I do use google search every so often.