Why would something like Google search possibly be irrelevant?
well..
a lot of these search engines use search engine Optimization, seo to rank sites. It's also not secret that they choose what shows up and what does not.
Things like that have been a thing for years, and since there wasn't a good alternative search engines remained relevant as we users tolerated their direction.
Now you have Lemmy, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish (if it's still a thing) connected to the Fediverse. On the Fediverse there is no such thing as looking up a website, but rather you look up actual specific content and get real results handed back to you. A lot of these Federated services are split and one person pays for hosting a smaller server, and the next another, slowly building up the bigger federated Fediverse.
On Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to, no bs, you get to hear about what's happening with WIndows 11 from different voices. Is the *Windows cool, a tragedy, is there that one guy that *disfavors it, or is in favor of WIndows 11?
It's all there and you as a user gets to decide for yourself if you like all the results you see, or some, or none of them and then move on with your day as it should be.
Thoughts? Opinions? Statements? Judge rulings?
Dude, search engines are still the lifeblood of the Internet, even if they're being poisoned. Your proposal to just grow the Fediverse into the place you search for info does nothing more than replace the HTML/hyperlink-based world with a Markdown/ActivityPub-based world. You'll still need a search engine to index and organize zottabytes of data.
If you think for a second that the Fediverse won't immediately be exploited, overrun, and ruined by advertisers the second it becomes large enough to be relevant, you haven't been on the internet very long. It's only a matter of time before one of the big instances sells out to some corporation all the users stay where they are because it's easier, and the process starts again.
This is a never ending battle that decentralization won't solve. Usenet, IRC, email, and early websites were all pretty well decentralized, and they were all overrun with ads, spam, and scams. Part of why so many services became centralized with big providers is that the constant escalation of protection vs. usability needs more resources than small time sysadmins can handle. They sell out, centralize, or shut down.
As far as Google and SEO, the current nightmare was originally Google trying to get SEO under control. Webmasters were learning to game the pagerank system, and the early SEO tools let them do that fairly. Then Google went public, bought DoubleClick and monetized the shit out of it, letting ads override their product, and here we are.
Edit, more:
No, you have a community to click onto. Or a whole-ass instance. Also, I can't just search my instance and get all the potential hits from instances that aren't federated.
Lol, what? A dozen bs replies for each useful reply, even in the good threads.
Which of those voices exactly is authoritative?
Simply having multiple voices doesn't imply more useful information if most of those voices are full of shit. (Also, it's only a matter of time before half those voices are ads, scams, and bots.)
I understand that Google has a lot of data to shift through, and that maybe the Fediverse probably can't do everything it does. When a user tries to search for certain things on a search engine it's like Google goes out of it's way to hide a lot of it.
I guess what I am trying to say is the Fediverse is best for finding discussion, and up to date topics, and opinions from more voices instead of the few that gain the seo system. When it comes to local stuff, I would probably use Google maps or something like that just so I can say I don't need a search engine for that, but that's just me when it comes to local searches.
If one server were to get too big and do ads and all that, guess what, it's not like with Youtube for example where that's your only option you can just switch your instance and you won't be censored you just won't show up on that corrupted instance. The fact that the Fediverse is decentralized and federated absolutely will prevent this from being as bad as it was with the og old internet.
The reason Facebook took over was essentially the fact that it was it's own platform, and you couldn't communicate with your friends from that old forum site from Facebook.
When one or 5 servers get to a certain size I would assume some instances would block some of the largest instances, but would still be usable as it could still federate with other instances. The Fediverse designed to combat this type of thing, while the old internet, really had no way to combat this. Sure it thought well for people it just wasn't built to give people enough power to avoid bigger sites from controlling and censoring the entirety of what is said online and still have success and activity.
While email was federated, it was also commercial in most used cases. Actually email itself hasn't really had any big take over or monopoly and emails seem to send even to this day from smaller email services to larger email services. So this seems to prove that federation can prevent what you seem to be claiming if people make the right steps with the tools they have.
You're shifting your topics a bit from the relevance of search engines. You've gone from "Google is irrelevant it's not 2010" to "Lemmy search is better for searching Lemmy." Which, no argument there, I guess.