Fair points.

I get your point about google being popular for the millions of phone using consumers that are too busy caring about other things than to change the defaults that are being sold to them,

using "dying" and "google" in a sentence when speaking for webmasters / people who have web sites - is certainly a thing though.

I said some time ago that google is to become the new yellow pages, and apparently last year more than half the web searches got zero clicks via google.

More and more people are becoming aware of privacy concerns and how to do things without big F and G. I know this is not at a tipping point for google, but look at the whatsapp privacy debacle and how a good percentage of users can be lost in just a month.

I see more and more people skipping google and going straight to youtube/reddit/amazon / etc.. I expect more and more people to continue to 'search' starting with other portals.

Now I do see google keeping dominance with local search / maps - mainly because people/businesses tend to update their google local listing as being the most important (as opposed to people updating their fbook listing, which for most, I believe is easier.)

this is partially do to the default with android. Should an Msoft like antitrust thing force removal of gmaps / gmail / similar - like the courts demanded of IE with msoft long ago.. fbook could take the place for most current 'yellow pages like' information.

Sure there could be places for others to jump in, especially if open maps gamified with foursqaure - combined with visa/mc rewards.. so yeah, big things are possible.

Also, I wonder how much of that is inflated by defaults on iOs / Android, including apps like maps / mail.. Also after seeing dozens of people "search" for google, by typing google into the search bar, before googling it.. I think it's fair to say the results are a bit skewed.

Anyhow, google is still looking more and more like the yellow pages - this is good in some ways, however as for web site owners who are not in the top 3 of g search results, and especially those not in the top 10 - google is less important than ever, and actually it's existence and it's ads are a detriment.

I expect more web sites will be catering to Bing and even instagram / fbook / reddit, etc... as this happens more and more, and google continues to censor and keep clicks more and more - I believe a few anti-google / hiding info from google protest kind of things couple have a similar paradigm shift that occurred with myspace.

I also think we will see a more divided net as whole not too long from now - different rules for different countries and states will continue and all that.

Anyhow I do believe google is the new yellow pages, and right now they are the most used 'not-the-Real yellow pages' - so they get the most money for ads and people find their local space important.

Yet google as many of us once knew it, has been dying a slow not-so-painful death for a long time, and I don't see it going back to the cool it once was. Sterile, yes.. cool.. not so much.

I know, small data points don't speak for the world. But what number of of 'former 100% google users' need to change to alternative sources before it's okay for people to say 'for many, google has been dying' ?

I for one used to teach people how to use google.. these days I teach people to use alternatives and why.

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