I had to do some web scraping for an application that I recently wrote and only when my app's performance started to rely on the results provided by the various search engines out there, I started to fully appreciate how good Google is. It's just no comparison; in edge cases, misspelled and unconventional searches (where it really matters) Google completely creams the competition.
While Bing came closest to providing search results as accurate as Googles it still wasn't at any comparable level, so all in all I agree with your point.
I'm a foreigner so that maybe explains why I can't relate to what you're saying, but does omitting the 'the' at the beginning of my phrase really make it bad grammar? I imagine it colloquial speech.