I don't know about Google is dying but Google Search has lost me. Remember when Bing! first came out (IIRC it had the exclamation point and the advert line was

I don't know about Google is dying but Google Search has lost me. Remember when Bing! first came out (IIRC it had the exclamation point and the advert line was something like, "Don't say you Binged it, say you Banged! it!" -- or something equally cringey only an adman could love) ... the results were not great, and someone (probably on Reddit) said that Bing was only great for porn searches. And I was aware of all kinds of optimizations went on at MSFT to make Bing competitive with Google Search and I remember thinking to myself, they will never catch up, it's too late, Google Search was light years ahead. And I think Bing was the replacement for MSN Search which was even worse. I didn't use Bing for the longest time, but as Google Search got worse and worse and everything I search for now leads to something to buy instead of information, I went to Bing to see if it's just as trashy. Lo and behold! There's a beautiful photo of something interesting in the world every day, and I love it. It's a Google Doodle tactic I guess, but they got me. All those engineering hours of algorithmic grinding and really all they needed to get me was some happy picture of the world and animals. Apparently you can win the Internet with cat pics. Steve Ballmer must be kicking himself. And now, there's Bing with ChatGPT integration, and I mostly use Bing now. Results are still SEO'd to hell, so there's that. Remember the innocent old days when I (we) conscientiously clicked on some ad with deliberation, because the search results were good and we wanted to little guys to make some fraction of pennies that Google paid them? At one time there were a rash of search engine contenders, before Google there was AltaVista; a Google offshoot with an unpronounceable name, Cuil, Cuoil, was a thing, so was Yahoo! Search. Google Search is not so much dying, as "Search" is being destroyed through ad monetization. I know (or believe) there are still pockets of the internet with useful information, but when I go to Google it seems that there's nothing except things to buy, it's a giant mall where everybody is but nobody wants to be.