New site: google just killed search https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
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@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.Big companies die form a thousand cuts.
Today it's much easier to convince people switch to Kagi than 10 years ago. It's easier to have meaningful connections on Mastodon/fedi than 5-10 years ago.
Internet is not dying. Some part of it is definitely rotting, agree. The most popular part, unfortunately. But you still can do Indie Web dives and find awesome things.
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R relay@relay.publicsquare.global shared this topic
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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.
@nixCraft Just install SearxXNG on your computer or server. -
Big companies die form a thousand cuts.
Today it's much easier to convince people switch to Kagi than 10 years ago. It's easier to have meaningful connections on Mastodon/fedi than 5-10 years ago.
Internet is not dying. Some part of it is definitely rotting, agree. The most popular part, unfortunately. But you still can do Indie Web dives and find awesome things.
@ffloyd @alan @nixCraft Yeah I totally agree on that!
Fediverse now is at least a steady alternative, lemmy as well. And i'm using only them.
But is still hard to presuade average people, although I agree nowadays it's easier.
I'm trying to give my little contribution, moving few friends and groups toward alternatives.
But I really hope that big corpo see numbers start to go down, like it was happened with fb recently, and not being an isolate thing, but becoming a trend.
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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.
@nixCraft Stopped using Google Search back in 2015. Never looked back. DuckDuckGo, Startpage or Qwant are awesome search engines that have delivered everything I needed.
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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.
@nixCraft I think you're mixing up two things: AI search hurting traffic economics for the open web — real concern.
The old search already became miserable years ago because of SEO sludge, content farms and keyword voodoo.
LLMs understanding intent instead of forcing users to guess magic keywords is actually a huge UX improvement.
The challenge is preserving incentives for open knowledge, not preserving "10 blue links + SEO warfare" forever.
So let's agree to disagree.
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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.
@nixCraft Yeah, and then sites keep doing this, which may be another reason many just go G00GLE and ask their "AI" ...
I wonder if any of those ads may, perhaps, in a distant universe, be tracking visitors ...
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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.
@nixCraft Wasn't there an initiative to build a European Search Engine - open source?
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@nixCraft Yeah, and then sites keep doing this, which may be another reason many just go G00GLE and ask their "AI" ...
I wonder if any of those ads may, perhaps, in a distant universe, be tracking visitors ...
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@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.
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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.
People really need to put some effort into expanding their horizons:
Firefox browser tab, DuckDuckGo with the NO AI option turned on for all searching
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People really need to put some effort into expanding their horizons:
Firefox browser tab, DuckDuckGo with the NO AI option turned on for all searching
@FinchHaven @nixCraft
"Just order a pizza from DuckDuckPizza with the NO GLUE option turned on".Why is there a glue option in the first place? And why would I want to eat anything from a place that serves pizza with glue?
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@FinchHaven @nixCraft
"Just order a pizza from DuckDuckPizza with the NO GLUE option turned on".Why is there a glue option in the first place? And why would I want to eat anything from a place that serves pizza with glue?
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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.
@nixCraft Bright side, Google has gotten bad enough that nothing of value has been lost.
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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.
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?
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@nixCraft I think you're mixing up two things: AI search hurting traffic economics for the open web — real concern.
The old search already became miserable years ago because of SEO sludge, content farms and keyword voodoo.
LLMs understanding intent instead of forcing users to guess magic keywords is actually a huge UX improvement.
The challenge is preserving incentives for open knowledge, not preserving "10 blue links + SEO warfare" forever.
So let's agree to disagree.
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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?
The indie blog initiative is a good one too: https://mathstodon.xyz/@indieblog@indieweb.social
As is the humans.txt for personal web pages https://humanstxt.org/
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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.
@nixCraft isn't Qwant a decent european alternative ? #google #searchengine #qwant
www.qwant.com -
@nixCraft I think you're mixing up two things: AI search hurting traffic economics for the open web — real concern.
The old search already became miserable years ago because of SEO sludge, content farms and keyword voodoo.
LLMs understanding intent instead of forcing users to guess magic keywords is actually a huge UX improvement.
The challenge is preserving incentives for open knowledge, not preserving "10 blue links + SEO warfare" forever.
So let's agree to disagree.
-
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.
@nixCraft
This is why I use alternative search engines now and when I do use google I use the timeframe options to only search before 2019.
