Privacy is a big one and there’s some good points in this thread, but I’d like to ad that G is an advertising company before anything else. All they’ve every really wanted to do is sell you as a product.
We might be better off going back to web rings, word of mouth, and searching websites like Wikipedia and Imdb directly. I, for one, am sick of being funneled into the same bad results every time I search. The same old forum posts from 10 years ago with outdated information, many of which claim "your question was answered already!" followed by a dead link or a flame war.