It is no solution to the problem, but perhaps a band aid for some of the symptoms. If everyone stopped using Google, Startpage would need to get their own crawler. I welcome a day where (in practice) a search engine doesn't have monopoly on search.
For me it is a first step. Google wont have an easy time connecting my searches to my any of my Google Profiles (where their every source of data is combined). I've been using raw Google since I left Altavista (RIP), which was quite a while ago. I'm looking forward to look into http://www.seeks-project.info/
