I tried to Google ‘how to cook steak medium rare’ last week.
The first result was a sponsored ad for a meal kit I’ll never buy. The second was a blog post that opened with a 1,500-word autobiography about the author’s childhood summers at a ranch in Montana. I scrolled for four minutes and still hadn’t found the cooking temperature.
I opened TikTok. Typed the same query. Found a 28-second video of a chef searing a ribeye with a timestamp overlay showing internal temperature. No ads. No life story. No SEO keyword stuffing. Just the answer.
This is the shift everyone in tech media is writing about but few actually understand. Google isn’t dying because the technology is bad. Google is dying because the incentive structure broke.
Every website on the first page of Google is optimized for Google, not for you. They write 3,000-word articles because Google’s algorithm rewards length. They stuff keywords into headers because Google’s crawler looks for them. The content exists to rank, not to help. And after years of this, the first page of Google has become a wall of SEO-optimized noise.
TikTok’s advantage is authenticity. The comments section is the real-time fact-checker. If a video gives bad advice, the first three comments will roast them. There’s no way to ‘SEO’ your way to the top of TikTok. The algorithm watches behavior—completion rate, replays, shares—not metadata.
I’ve also started using AI chatbots for factual queries. Capital cities. Historical dates. Unit conversions. Why would I wade through ten blue links when a chatbot gives me the direct answer in two seconds?
When I find genuinely useful video content—a tutorial I’ll want to reference later—I save it locally. I don’t trust bookmarks or ‘Liked’ lists because platforms delete content constantly. I grab the file with GetInSaver and archive it. My personal search engine is a folder on my desktop.
Google isn’t dead yet. But it’s lost the default status. The reflex to ‘just Google it’ is fading, and nothing the company does with AI summaries or Gemini integration seems to be slowing that down.
The future of search is visual, social, and fast. If you can’t show me the answer in under a minute, I’m already scrolling.