Search died, and none of us noticed. Why would Google announce it? It'd be like the Milk Processor board announcing that all dairy cattle went extinct... no, they'd just try to slip oat juice in as a substitute and hope no one notices.

Cloudflare murdered crawlers. Then, OpenAI and Anthropic nailed a few hundred nails into the coffin just to be sure... whatever large websites were still semi-open weren't going to let their precious data be ingested for free. Good prostitutes don't give it away.

I'm not sure when all this happened. It snuck up on me too. I think maybe 10 years ago search still worked. Not long after that though. It was dead 6 years ago, and I want to say it was dead even 8 years ago. Someone else could do a better job narrowing it down I'm sure.