Ask HN: When Will Google Kill Search?
Google has cancelled so many products. When will they kill their search engine? It's just a matter of time.
However, the direct response seems more sooner than later. If they could keep ads up and running while providing users with a direct responses to their questions or queries, I think they would.
They've taken over many areas
- answers - flights - comparison - shopping - images resulting in difficulty to click through to the site - Videos will likely be able to be played in search in the future.
Therefore, you're not fully thinking through. Search is ending, answers is on the rise, to keep a user on the page compared to sending a user to a website.
Facebook has already done this with news, why link to an article when you can keep the user in Facebook and keep showing ads.
Google will likely want to answer questions and keep users on Google.com compared to other sites. Likely going to cause a massive lawsuit, which is likely why it's not something they have done already. However, they are slowly chipping away at this, so people don't notice as much.
The image search has seemed to be their first attacking point and was sued due to it.
Here some proof of this, at once they removed "visit site" and only recently added it. They also make finding related photos easier and giving users a UX that removes the site they are taking them from.
https://9to5google.com/2018/02/09/google-images-features-get...
So for that, I think while the question seems to be trolling, its really not.