This is a meta post. A discussion rose up on HN, so much that people at New Yorker took notice, cited HN, and that article is posted here too.

A couple of observations since I last wrote my thoughts on this (last time i said this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348492) :

- People who work in tech do not constitute the avg internet user now a days who uses Google to search. Naturally, google evolved to serve the lowest denominator by default, and that would probably not be satisfying for advanced users. (which opens up space for a new competitor I think?) Half the searches are when people are asking basic questions - hence they do not even result in a click. I have searched multiple times for a random calculation because google is faster than opening a calculator on mac.

- Adding site:reddit.com is a feature, and it's a utility of the engine that Google is allowing us to concentrate search to a subset. Same goes with many other operators, it's just another phrase. Ideally, there could be a wrapper which does these things for us, but I doubt it would work well. That does not mean Google search is dying, but more like we are now realizing the dependency we had on Google and the laziness when it comes to finding things on the internet.