It is incredibly scary to think that a single corporation controls the search...
Essentially... in a nutshell... he who owns the gold makes the rules.
I have stopped using google services out of the same sort of fear you have. I can see no reason why ask, metacrawler, bing, or yahoo results are not equally as good. I mean wikipedia dominates the charts no matter which search engine you use anyways...
I have been using bing for about two weeks now and I actually like it better. I mean it's only been about 7 years of non-stop use with google. I'm rather sick of google at this point. They are so different from when they started out anyways.
This year alone I have watched google cut the traffic to two completely legitimate websites. When all the referrals are coming from a single search engine that really hurts business. They were not websites which were doing anything wrong. Google actually just broke for a little while. My complaints and concerns went unanswered to boot... 80-90% Traffic loss for a solid week because a single search engine dominates the market for no good reason what-so-ever is a little scary... you are absolutely correct.
That being said... Most websites I watch have begun to receive referrals from bing which are better than both msn and yahoo combined... it's good traffic from bing so far...
Perhaps
seo's should focus more on search, rather than just google...