Search died ages ago [1]. Ads dying is a direct consequence of that.

[1] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

> Search died ages ago

You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively:

https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-...

Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.

‘Numbers go up’ is the exact type of thinking that caused the death of search.

From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.

Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers.

If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?

Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.

Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans

Again, then why are people using Google more than ever?

I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.

Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.

For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.

That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.

This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.

> Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?

Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly revenue from Search.

Exactly this. Businesses decide whether to pay for ads based on clickthru rates and conversions. Bots don't click through. They don't convert. If these rates fall, advertisers will pay proportionally less as their max bid, and Search ads revenue will fall substantially.

That hasn't happened. Google continues to grow with real users.

You get what you measure.

It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?

The design of Chrome is such that people use Google search instead of entering the tld.

The policy described in my link is literally about making each user search more to get the results they want in order to drive more ad revenue. That would create more searches and a less good user experience.

That is good evidence that Google is dying because it takes more than one search query to find what you want.

You should let Google know, given their business is really humming nowadays. Along with their stock price.

Gemini is the new search.

AI is not and cannot be search. Search is dead and has been for a few years now. Search has seemingly been subsumed into the LLM monster, considering how "fuzzy" queries have become (probably because they're not hitting the search algorithm without being massaged by "something else"). Significant portions of the web have been purged from Google's index, which means that neither Gemini nor Search can present those pages to users.

It's over. Sorry.

When people say "search is dead", I feel like you and I live on different planets.

If I have a Google idea of what I want, Google search works great. On the rare occasion I don't know the specific thing I'm looking for, Gemini points the way.

It had never ever been easier for me to find what I'm looking for on the internet, since 1993-1994.

Search -> click on website -> read website to find the information you wanted; is dead/dying.

I agree that paradigm is over and using Google search feels antiquated. It’s not a good outcome for website owners, but I want info retrieval.

I believed these sorts of statements a few years ago, but not anymore. Results were hit-and-miss enough to give the benefit-of-the-doubt. They're now so bad that I assume bad faith, either on the part of the speaker or Google.

But Gemini doesn't bring much visitors to your website. Also, optimizing for AI is even more "black magic" than normal SEO.

Google considers the consumer's side, not just the publishers. Users often don't want to visit someone's website (and then dodge ads and cookie/newsletter/notification popups). If the query can be answered without veer visiting a website, so much the better.

Instead sites adds Gemini integrations, which are targeted based on prompts. When you pay enough, Gemini recommends your shop and AI buys the stuff for the target audience.

Yep, I use it when I run out of free usage on ChatGPT or DeepSeek, or for simple queries, once ads show up I’ll block them or use something else

Google search died years ago already.