Is (Google) search still relevant?

[inevrela]

How important is the classical search in your daily life and/or for your product?

Most of the tools and services that I have used over the past years were not found via classical search at all – and I barely use it to discover something new. For regular users, it's more of a bookmark hack – you already know what you want and search is two extra clicks between A-B.

Nonetheless, it is still a huge market driven by advertising. And seems so F lame – that it is still the beginning of many customer journeys. (user searches blablabla, clicks on blablabla)

Why? Is it still important for you and the people around you?

[theamk]

How do you live without Google (or another general purpose search engine)?

I have lots of random questions all the time - “how is cheese made”, “how to restore scroll by middle click”, “what is the good hosted dashboard for ~10 points/sec” - and I cannot imagine finding the answers without a search engine.

[yesenadam]

>For regular users, it's more of a bookmark hack

"Regular users"? I don't know if that's true or not.

>Why? Is it still important for you and the people around you?

Not sure what "Why?" means. By "the classical search", you seem to mean "googling for things when you don't know exactly what that will be". Yes, "still" important for me and the people around me. For movies and list of movies I google with "imdb" in the search, for wikipedia stuff with "wiki", StackExchange-type stuff is by googling..

[lixtra]

Try to turn it off and see what happens.

[dgarud]

As a software dev I need code snippets in different programming languages, or how to for related stuff. I know mostly the answers will be on stackoverflow but rather than search on that site, its better to google for it. This allows search on multiple sites and the summary listings help decide where to go next.