So... instead of using a tool that will search virtually every source of information on the internet for you to bring you the most relevant results, you are blogging about how you limit your search breadth to single places that you happen to participate in...
You could do that to pretty much every opinion piece posted and upvoted on HN. Many posters here have obvious blinders on, posts about what someone is doing are presented as 'this is what everyone is doing' or 'this is what everyone will do' because if this person is doing it, everyone must be.
Why not cut out the middle man? I don't search wikipedia, I just immediately land on the article I need. I have wikipedia built into my browser's address bar so why bother?
Using browsers without customizable search (tablets) is painful.
Seriously. Google searches these sites better than each site's own native search. And Google search is readily available in my Chrome browser bar on my laptop and phone, why would I take the added step of going to each site for their own inferior search?
Here's a rule... if you want to title your blog with something sweeping like "The growing irrelevance of X," you need to provide real, cited data to substantiate that claim. Just because you use Google less, doesn't mean there's a trend of doing so.
" When each site understands its own data better than Google, its internal search results will surpass Google’s. Google will no doubt continue to provide better global results, but the two-tiered search would decentralize efforts to improve algorithms. It is important to note that this solution does not need to be distributed: sites can share their local indexes and ranking algorithms with the routing search engine."
The author has a major point, we new need a new type of search engine. The most useful searches come from structured data, not web pages. It should return answers, not blue links. If you want to try that new search engine, I'm building it. Sign up at http://toinfinit.com/
...yawn