Chrome ➡️ Brave - Open source and privacy focused
Search ➡️ Qwant - Good search results and privacy focusing
Photos ➡️ Immich - Pretty much Google Photos but self hosted
Drive ➡️ Nextcloud - Use it with Hetzner Storage Share, pretty cheap and easy to use
Gmail ➡️ mailbox.org - European email hosting focusing on privacy
Meet ➡️ Nextcloud
Because of network effects.
Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don't have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don't have a user base.
It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.
The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.
For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.