Why would something like Google search possibly be irrelevant?
well..
a lot of these search engines use search engine Optimization, seo to rank sites. It's also not secret that they choose what shows up and what does not.
Things like that have been a thing for years, and since there wasn't a good alternative search engines remained relevant as we users tolerated their direction.
Now you have Lemmy, Mastodon, Sharkey, Firefish (if it's still a thing) connected to the Fediverse. On the Fediverse there is no such thing as looking up a website, but rather you look up actual specific content and get real results handed back to you. A lot of these Federated services are split and one person pays for hosting a smaller server, and the next another, slowly building up the bigger federated Fediverse.
On Lemmy you can just type in Windows 11, and no website to click on to, no bs, you get to hear about what's happening with WIndows 11 from different voices. Is the *Windows cool, a tragedy, is there that one guy that *disfavors it, or is in favor of WIndows 11?
It's all there and you as a user gets to decide for yourself if you like all the results you see, or some, or none of them and then move on with your day as it should be.
Thoughts? Opinions? Statements? Judge rulings?
Unlike on Google search, if you see a bot on Lemmy, or Mastodon, you can just block the bot and never see them again. Follow accounts/communities you trust to be reliable for finding info on various topics to eliminate the chances of running into the bots (since you more likely will be looking at your following feed.)
I wish seo would make the web more lively again but I just see them as a lost cause, and the Fediverse as the better future.
I've been blocking bots for 6 months now, it's a neverending stream of new garbage.
That's a price to pay to have a free internet.
If bots are an issue, and I believe it can be sometimes, you could try suggesting to Lemmy developers to invest into bot protection for the platform. Also, the instance maintainers themselves.
So one bot watches and another posts, possibly from an established account farmed with real human labor.