Its not particularly hard to live google-free now, now that you know all of the places you want to go on the internet and have many good Google-alternatives.
Because you're already aware of wikipedia, and allrecipes, and reddit, and BBC news, etc, etc.
All of the fine websites you enjoy however were almost all once learned about from Google Search or else someone who used search.
Had you not had any contact with Google Search or the people who used it in the first place from 2001-2011, you'd probably still think the internet is a trite place where there's not much to learn.
And presumably if you stopped using Google Search now and there were no good search alternatives, you'd miss out on a lot of good sites that will be developed between 2011 and 2020.
Luckily for the author, search is a booming field today. It's true that Google isn't any better than the other options available today, but when you were doing most of your fledgling searching for good content sites back in (say) '02-'06, it was there and you benefited massively.
In this way I kind of think the article is essentially saying "It is easy to live without parents once you're already an adult." Trivially true, but greatly mis-understanding of the importance that his search-parents had on him.