Again, this "death of search" I hear so much about, but doesn't exist in the numbers.
If search results are such a waste of time, why do people keep using Google? In ever-increasing numbers? What's the explanation there?
Dead internet theory explains this perfectly well.
Google search results are a wasteland of ads and content farms, with vanishingly small value for humans
The design of Chrome is such that people use Google search instead of entering the tld.
You get what you measure.
It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?