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?
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.
Sometimes a user might feel like so abour search engines with the way seo is handling things, but I am open to being wrong about search engines for ever being irrelevant if seo improves their tactics for the users, and not just a small percent of investors and companies. As I see it they are irrelevant, but you could probably still use them for a few things, but that's only as usable as the seo criterea.