Post by @nixCraft@mastodon.social

New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/

yeah, we know. We saw a massive drop in SO/Wikipedia traffic over the last 2 years, so yday's announcement was just closing the deal. Google has officially killed the web that was made of links. It is now a giant box that steals web pages/images/videos from all websites and pretends to know everything with its model and weights often with lots of wrong information. I hope this madness leads to a better search engine and EOL of Google.

TechCrunch

Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and interactive interfaces — a shift that could further reduce traffic to publishers across the web.

Albert Cardona

@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz · 32 minutes ago

@nixCraft

Aren’t they saying, in the absence of web search, use web rings and human-curated indices/directories of relevant pages? Didn’t work that badly back in 1998. Was a lot more local too.

Wikipedia, OpenAlex, ORCID, web archive, and many other repositories have their own search engines. A link to these online resources may suffice. And regionally focused efforts to relate e.g. businesses with locations of a map like @lokjo does also help.

Perhaps all we need to do is ignore Google and move on?

Lyon Leshley

@citify@social.leshley.ca · 3 hours ago

@nixCraft Just install SearxXNG on your computer or server.

Carlos Solís

@csolisr@hub.azkware.net · 1 hour ago

SearxNG is a search aggregator, not a search engine by itself. There are several search engines that we can rely on besides of Google, but we still depend on proprietary services being around. Closest thing to an open-source engine alternative is YaCy, and that relies on random users being willing to both use their bandwidth to crawl websites regularly, and store the hundreds of gigabytes of data this generates.

@alan@lighthouse.co.im · 4 hours ago

@nixCraft "Giant box that steals web pages" is accurate as far as it goes -- but Google isn't dying, it's eating the web and becoming the web. The ten blue links were at least a map. What replaces them is a curator with no obligation to show you the source. The sovereignty question isn't whether Google survives -- it's who controls what you're allowed to find.

Ivan G.

@dreamos82@mastodon.world · 4 hours ago

@alan @nixCraft yeah that is the main problem.

Ther are still alternatives, but who is going to use them? Is few years that i'm using duckduckgo as a search engine, but all the other people I know are still relying on google.
I managed to migrate few friends chats and group to signal, but then too many other are left on the other side. So the main problem is how to persuade the average users to switch.
This is the big challenge, and pretty hard to achieve in my opinion.