Google is no longer a search engine anymore. They don’t care about being one. Why you might ask?
First, a search engine indexes the web and makes it available to users. It’s been ages since Google did any of that. They no longer index sites or take ages to do so. Case in point, our cybersecurity startup (Webvetted.com) was launched in November 2025. Till date, only one page is indexed on the entire website. And I’ve talked to lots of other developers and it’s a common issue.
Secondly, a search engine organizes indexed information and makes it useful for people. Google is a basic LLM nowadays. They figured out that why organize and make the information useful when they could just answer the question with Gemini anyways? So they no longer bother to do the work of a search engine and are now just a lower-ranking open-source Chinese LLM
Your trust score on ScamAdvisor is 26/100 ("likely unsafe"); https://www.scam-detector.com/ gives you a trust score of 38.6 ("questionable").
I am not implying that your start-up is a scam, nor that Google is acting on these trust scores. What I am pointing out is that to an algorithmic assessment of trustworthiness, your website looks a little sketchy: hardly anyone links to you; your domain is less than a year old; your whois info is anonymized; the text content is LLM-generated[1]; and the specific niche you're in (people finding services) is rife with scams. If I ran my own search engine, I don't think I'd include you.
> They no longer index sites or take ages to do so
Search for any recent news and you’ll see this is obviously not the case
I just gave a concrete example but you're asking me to "search". search same Google? FYI, only indexing a handful of super large news sites does not a search engine make.
Additionally the concept of a search engine only works when the internet is full of positive-quality sites.
Actually, the reverse is the case. If the entire internet was filled with only "positive-quality sites", there won't be need for a search engine.
The work of a search engine is to wade through the internet and find the positive-quality sites itself.
You're forgetting the other half of the search engine's job, which is to find sites that match your search. Back when Google first came online, they were head and shoulders above Yahoo!, Altavista, and whatever other search engines existed at the time that I've forgotten. Because their indexing actually did a good job of spotting keywords, and returning relevant results. And this was back when the Internet was filled with positive-quality sites. Many of them were amateurish Geocities pages, but that was head and shoulders above the AI slop that the search engines these days have to somehow detect and filter out.
So even when the Internet used to have a much higher ratio of positive-quality sites, a search engine was still necessary, and so much faster than finding new sites yourself.