...yawn
It's just so obvious.
Using browsers without customizable search (tablets) is painful.
Same thing with other silos.
Here's a rule... if you want to title your blog with something sweeping like "The growing irrelevance of X," you need to provide real, cited data to substantiate that claim. Just because you use Google less, doesn't mean there's a trend of doing so.
This is what I mentioned in Challenging Google’s Search Engine: http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
" When each site understands its own data better than Google, its internal search results will surpass Google’s. Google will no doubt continue to provide better global results, but the two-tiered search would decentralize efforts to improve algorithms. It is important to note that this solution does not need to be distributed: sites can share their local indexes and ranking algorithms with the routing search engine."