Why do people say Google search is dying?

"I mean, I don't remember the last time it didn't direct me to the right resources."

The internet is dying because of bots and their generated senctences unconnected to reality. Here's a UUID you will not comprehend. 25250006-c1f2-493f-abb9-eb96d9aa45e3

1. "People" say many things. You can find at least a few people who say the most absurd things.

2. There are literally millions of websites trying to game Google, so that their precious site ranks higher and gets more traffic. Google did a better job of indexing the web when the web wasn't actively working against Google.

I used to use google extensively for research purposes for verifying data and correlating it etc. I started back in the days when google could only use 10 words in a query. I did have access to a better search engine at that time, but usually it was the first engine of choice and then I'd double check with a few other search engines just to be sure. Often a search query would result in the order of 50 results I might pursue and open in additional tabs after looking though the top 1000 results (10 pages of 100 results each.) This allowed me to skip over the gaming of search results often enough. Since I spent the day doing this one would think I'd avoid any more while online at night, but since there were often forums that needed information - documentation, it sort of became my niche function at a few forums I've joined ... but slowly google made using multiple switches together harder (you're a bot) and eventually many of those switches became somewhat pointless / broken.

Lets skip to present time ... compared to even when I pulled the pin on it a few years ago, it's a shadow of once what was, good for ordinary run of the mill topic matters that most other search engines can do. it should understand quotes means the word and not resort to verbatim which my experience interferes with time ranges.

I'm just waiting on a search engine to be able to do what old pre 2010 google could do. Blocking sites was really nice -site:foo.bar scum.com dingbat.nuts scam.central ... easy peasy. I recall google easily handling 15 or so waste of time sites that would pop up in certain documentation searches - and IIRC at once stage it was handling maybe 20 or so until it didn't.

Edit to add: P.S. I no longer do research work or at personal forums offer to search.

I find Google to be bloated, filled with manipulative distractions, and worst of all it often answers me with search results according to what it thinks I want (based on previous searches) rather than directly responding to my straight forward request.

Not a day goes by where I'm not pissed at Google for making it annoyingly difficult to find basic information, and for putting more and more ads and manipulative crap above actual useful results. Dunno how you aren't experiencing that. Maybe you don't remember how easy it used to be to find things with it?

It is because they want engagement clickbait since their claim is completely unfounded. Look at similarweb stats. [0] Google is #1 worldwide and is still unchallenged.

It is not dying. It has won and it is still winning for years.

Only techies here with zero evidence and sources like to project and convince themselves about this nonsense of Google ‘dying’.

We’ve also given the ChatGPT hype enough time to hold and still Google remains unchallenged and still remains the top search engine worldwide.

[0] https://www.similarweb.com/engines/

It's good that Google works for your searches. It routinely fails to find not only specific hits it used to find (for me,) it fails to find entire categories.

I used to use it to look up error messages on stackexchange (where I have a specific error message.) I can look them up on stackexchange (or other similar sites) but the hits that have the exact matches are pushed down below the 5th or 6th page where Google stops.

I suspect there are a number of categories of searches it will continue to work for, but it seems every six months, there's another class of searches (for me) that used to work but no longer do.

Google is good for getting to large, well established websites but I rarely end up on a blog, personal website or small community forum.

It's also terrible for real time stuff.

Crap like this happens a lot more often: https://defcon.social/@fortyseven/111006211167398287

Granted, the result was on the page but I only noticed because I have custom CSS highlighting result keywords.

Then there's the whole instant answers thing where it scrapes a page to answer your question directly on the search result page. It's quite often wrong. Confidently wrong.

The quality in general has dropped like a rock. It's clearly no longer a priority.

The whole company is tanking in slow motion.

I have put ChatGPT on my dock in both Mac and iPhone for months. It’s just more efficient and faster to get answers at least for some quick day-to-day questions.

I can’t say Google Search will die but I believe with the increasing power of AI the search engine market is definitely shrinking. Just my 2 cents.