In what way is search about to change majorly?
To me that seemed more like a way to keep experimental projects without affecting Google as a stock.
So someone like me, a pretty shitty programmer, can use an language built on top of googlebot, like nodejs, and just index the stuff I care about and instead of that information being returned to google, I can just send it back to bots viewport directly and not even see the webpage, just the info if I want.
The problem is discovery (what google solved in 1999), no one knew where to find websites, like not even info, just what sites even were on the web. This is a huge pain point again because while there are a lot of great websites there are a ton of shitty ones. This is pretty obvious if you look at sites like reddit or hacker news. They are developed around the idea of aggregating good resources because there are so many it is overwhelming.
So, I think, that of the 50% of the people that are already running googlebot, some subset will start probably using it to get info they care about. Eventually, someone will write code you can use to make this easier for normal people, and then google whill either sell the silos of info to them instead of advertising, or use it in it's new meta structure to solve big problems.
[0]http://ipullrank.com/googlebot-is-chrome/ [1]http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-august-2015-chrome-e...
I also find searching for anything remotely niche has become extremely difficult because of this. Example being finding instructions on how to install some bike parts today. There were articles about the specific parts eventually, but only after significant iterations of my search terms and wading through all the matches from people targeting those keywords to sell product.
I feel like Google specifically are failing to wade through the sea of noise, and as a result it's becoming less and less useful.
It works well for things like programming troubleshooting, because we have high signal resources (stack overflow, for example) that often have the answers we need. But for anything outside of developer specific topics I usually have a really hard time finding anything useful and not spammy.
I now rely on having stumbled on some good sources, and sticking to reading those, rather than googling subject matters these days.
HN, Reddit and various news and tech sites curate content as you said, but the problem is that this creates a bubble and the beautiful world of exploration and learning that the web was all about disappears.
I am excited to see how we solve this problem, and who solves it.
In regards to Google Search going away, I feel like even if their search engine failed, the AdSense network would live on, and that is where the majority of their income comes from.
I'm not sure if the majority of it comes from Network ads (ads displayed on other sites) or search ads (ads displayed in their search engine). That might be informative of where they plan to focus their energies over the coming decades.
A problem is "useful to google" means serving you all those sites trying to sell you stuff and keeping you "on the web" longer so they can show you more ads and extract more data from your activities. They have to balance that with actually giving you what is useful to you.
I've got some handful websites for what I want to do with a computer and that's all. By the way, I search more in bookstores than on internet (maybe for quality not quantity, don't know).
Web disappoints me, kind of full of emptiness now. I do not think it's representative.