> their search product is dead

Do we have any evidence search volume is down?

Don't get me wrong, I'm an avid Kagi user. But I'm sceptical anyone outside tech is using anything other than Google.

I watch people search for PlatformName Login every single day because they don't know how URLs work.

Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money.

p.s. not google labs, not tpu's, but specifically search.

> Google isn't search. It's a crutch for people with too much time and money

…wouldn’t this make it an advertiser’s dream?

Google search ain't dead at all: it became so good something silly like 99% of all the queries have to be answered by the Google AI before the very first "result". And for those who want more, there's the "continue this discussion with Gemini".

Now this may not be great for Google Ads (dunno about that) but Google search now works better than it ever did.

Try to double check the AI inline response. Got it wrong way too many times to trust it now.

The AI summary is good enough often enough that it's tempting to rely on it. But, at least as of a week or two ago when I finally decided to block it, it still gets things badly wrong. (Sometimes seemingly inexplicably, but often because the results don't obviously contain an answer and yet the LLM is desperate to provide one.)