The problem is that there is no "entertainment" category of reader. Just different domains and special interests. Nobody likes accessing the internet with a low signal to noise ratio or fighting cut-and-paste "AI" websites that have been engineered to rank on Google.
I want this to not come off as condescending in text, I know that tabloids do not have the best reputation for their content. But I think there is a lot of value in emotional well-being, of which entertainment is a part. So I do not pretend to know whether Google promoting more of this type of content over hard technicals is a change for better or worse, just observing the shift I see from my perspective.
I hide as much as i can, and i never link direct, but please top tracking me?
There is very little tracking here. Basically, it's just taking note of browser headers, a country-level location, and maybe (I would guess) hashed IPs for returning visitors. I don't know. Herman Martinus might comment on this more.
But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater! There are many good self-built analytics solutions that do a lot to protect the reader's privacy. And a lot of small web people do care not to track excessively. Not only out of their respect for privacy, but also as insurance against causing harm to anyone if a data breach occurs.
Not everyone is in the business of brokering creepy data like some tech giants.
I would say they have risen to a detectable but insignificant stake. The founder of Kagi was up here recently saying they have on the order of thousands of active users, after I suggested some objective evidence indicated only hundreds of active users. Kagi is one of the ones with the biggest memeshare on HN, but it still has an active user base of roughly zero.
Bing/DDG have never respected quotes or verbatim, not that Google does anymore either. None of the majors, including Kagi, are surfacing community forums that I know exist and have a permissive robots.txt.
I've been suspecting orders from on high have been suppressing the discovery of organic content and forums for a while. Ten year old Quora questions and some cherry picked reddit content ranked against a keyword blocklist isn't all there is on the internet. But that's all the Bing/Google based engines show.
And my experience is that I'm an old school technical blogger who writes articles certainly not for the "entertainment" crowd, but for the professional crowd. My readership stays high from Monday to Friday and drops to nearly zero over the weekend.
Over the last 10 years, I have observed that my readers come from referrers like Google.com or Google.de less frequently. I would say that I get about 20 times fewer readers from Google. However, Google still constitutes about 90% of my readership, down from perhaps 97% to 99%. These are the facts, looking at my analytics.
The other 10% come from DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Bitbucket, MS Teams, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Atlassian, Swarm, Ecosia, topical forums, and company domains. The share of readership from sources other than Google used to be closer to 1% - 3% in the past.
From my experience as a user of Google, I also find it much more difficult to find experts in any given field. About a decade ago, I would find so many more hard-boiled technical blogs. Now, the mid-level college essay-style knowledge is much more promoted. This shift makes sense for Google as an ad company, even if it harms everyone, future Google included.
With all that said, here are my conclusions, based in the reality of my own technical blog and its readership -- Google is worse for the technical crowd, which is now more likely to share technical resources by word of mouth (like Atlassian, Swarm, Teams, topical forums and company domains) or find them with other search engines. Google's effectiveness has not significantly diminished, as it still accounts for 90% of the way people reach my technical blog, so it might still be very functional for this purpose. Challenger search engines appear to have gained a significant stake in the tech crowd, a contrast to the scenario 10 years ago. But it seems like the decline of Google is a bit catastrophized.
These are only thoughts from my perspective, though they are grounded in some objective metrics.