Search, as we used to know it, has been disappearing. People still think that they’re searching the internet the way that they used to in the 90s and the 00s when what they’re actually doing when ‘googling’ is scrolling through a feed derived from a much smaller index of corporate and leftist sites prioritized by Google’s algorithm. In the past, it was possible to get past them by scrolling through page results but that is increasingly becoming meaningless or impossible.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/woke-ai-means-the-end-of-a-free-internet/
Yeah, they've definitely walled in the search engines to approved content only.
Searching requires multiple search engines for some topics. But, the prediction to browsers being removed altogether sounds horrifying.
I'm honestly surprised the internet frontier lasted as long as it did.