I've started to wonder/worry that maybe it's not the search engines (excluding Google, I won't apologize for them). What if there's just nothing to search for? If there is little on the internet besides trash and a few big portals? Much of what you might be searching for whether you know it or not will be a reddit post, or Facebook, or Stackoverflow. And some of those places don't even allow for proper indexing by crawlers. Worse than that nightmare fuel is the idea that 2025 just isn't the same internet as we grew up with, where everyone was racing to shovel as much real content onto it as they could... today it's a bunch of grifters hoping to be influencers or Youtube personalities or skeevy scammers AI-generating slop but not much else.
And so, even if Google was the same thing it was back in 2010, there's no longer anything for "search" to find. And I hope you all downvote me to -50 and scream at me for being a retard with some snarky-assed abuse detailing how and why I am wrong. Because I don't want to be correct about this.
Unfortunately, I am also worried that is the case.
There was an era where there were a lot of completely free sites, because they were mostly academic or passion projects, both of which are subsidized by other means.
Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs.
And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche communities by offering them a much easier way to create a community and then killing it off.
Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages. There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon.
And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI into the mix.
And so, even if Google was the same thing it was back in 2010, there's no longer anything for "search" to find. And I hope you all downvote me to -50 and scream at me for being a retard with some snarky-assed abuse detailing how and why I am wrong. Because I don't want to be correct about this.