alt Hacker NewsGoogle 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
Replies
This sounds more like the page appears broken for the google crawler. I set up a new page about two weeks ago, cared about strong static HTML output, structured data and a sitemap and have 200 of 600 pages indexed today. Feels a bit slow to me but it definitely works.
I’ve seen good blogs get indexed by Google within 30 minutes of publishing, so I’m not sure the issue is that Google has stopped indexing new sites.
> 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
Additionally the concept of a search engine only works when the internet is full of positive-quality sites.
For myself at least, a couple times Google has promoted in search results scam sites that front run legitimate sites that sell event tickets. I haven't seen this for a while now but trust in Google as a search engine is gone.
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.