I read an article not to long ago, when the whole NSA think happened, and he explained the alternatives for most of Google's services. From there I got Firefox (I knew Firefox of course, I just didn't use it) and duckduckgo.com. I have never used Gmail. Of course I still use Youtube and Android because there is no actual alternative.
I really like duckduckgo.com, and if it fails me, all I have to do is put a !g at the end of it and it will search on Google.
Firefox is just as good/bad as Chrome... Chrome used to be very fast, now it is just as bloated as any other browser...