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?
And how exactly do you think google maps finds the results? If you think the search on google maps does not use a search engine, you have a lot to learn before having this discussion. Google maps is pretty much just a different interface for showing you results from the same, or at least extremely similar search engine as regular google uses
I agree its better to have several different options to pick from, monopolies are never a good thing. But that just means we don't want google to have a monopoly. It does not mean that we want search engines to be gone.
You are mixing things up that have nothing to do with each other. How is the fact that Facebook does not interact with old forums an argument for not having search engine services like google, duvkduckgo or bing? The federation in the fediverse definitely is nice and I hope it becomes the standard, but I really don't see how that would mean that we don't need search engine services anymore.
Okay fair enough, I'm just pointing out that your original claim that search engines are or should be irrelevant nowadays isn't really true.
My point about maps just was that there still is a search engine under the hood, so only using maps and not google does not enable you to say that you don't use search engines.
I agree about all that stuff you say about the fediverse but that has literally nothing to do with search engines.