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?
I wanted to add some extra context that I feel some commentators are missing and it could be my fault for not being as specific.
The reason I think search engines are becoming more irrelevant is because seo, it isn't like the year of 2010 where you would find more relevant resualts as easily.
If you read the title and the actual og post contents, you would find out i'm really just ranting about seo.
I did mention in the comments a few times that i'm not necessarily against search engines as they were originally intended to be used, but what seo has become for the modern search engine. Because of that, that is why search engines are becoming irrelevant to me.
So it isn't the issue with search engines at the surface, I do understand how they work, it's rather, what they had become on the inside behind the scenes with seo.