Setting aside for a moment the fact that virtually no one online has noticed that essentially every web search engine is now a search engine illusion (a facade - a 'Potemkin village'), we have a second issue at hand:
When these search engine illusions become the topic of discussion, virtually no one has any clue how powerful the search engines were before the illusions arrived, or how they were used.
This shouldn't be possible absent the killing-off of just about everybody who was using the Internet between 1998 and 2020.
I have no explanation for it.
There's some kind of Internet (maybe even reality) manipulation taking place that shouldn't be possible.
I used to work for altavista. Trust me I’ve noticed.
That was my go-to engine back in the day. Anything weird or conspiracy: altavista FTW. It's always interesting to me when something surfaces on TikTok (and makes its way onto here or wherever) and I think, yeah, I read that in a schitzo site in the late 90's that wasn't afraid of the <blink> tag </blink> I found via Altavista
I loved webcrawler.
I definitely noticed the shift. I was doing a lot of research at the time. Things I used to access easily are now buried, if they can be found at all. Certain information like docs have to be recalled if you have the name - but you can no longer find them doing a simple search.