Anyone who calls a search engine a parasite does not understand how the Internet works. A parasite attaches to a host and extracts whatever it needs without giving anything in return. Google and other search engines organize information on the Internet. Having a world wide web of information without a search engine does not make sense. How would you discover new nodes?
Since they are the organizers of information they are also the de facto gatekeepers for users who do not know how to discover knew content without them.
Having a world wide web of information without a search engine does not make sense. How would you discover new nodes?
The same way we did before search engines worked very well: via the network effect, by following hyperlinks from interesting articles, from discussion forums like this one, from human-generated links pages, and so on.
The WWW would not cease to be useful if search engines disappeared tomorrow, it would just adapt as it always has, and not necessarily for the worse.
You're right, it would not cease to be useful. But it would cease to be dominant because less people would find it accessible. Search engines allow the average user to orient themselves in the world wide web. It is a large part of why people leave the ordered safety of other mediums for the web. Without organization data is meaningless. And while you and I may be adept at navigating the web without the Google and Yahoos most people would be utterly lost and drown in a vast sea of information.
The thing is, we would never go back to just those things. You're ignoring all the other, much more significant developments that have taken place since.
For example, today we have social networking sites, blogs, and services like Twitter and StumbleUpon. All of these allow huge numbers of human-recommended links to be passed around very quickly.
I'm not saying that search engines aren't useful; in fact, I'm not really sure how we've jumped from the kind of Google services that were being criticised in the original article to attacking their search engine specifically. I'm just saying that if search engines went away, it's reasonable to assume that the web-surfing world would adapt, and that new and improved ways to find useful content have been invented and will continue to be developed whether or not search engines are around in their current form.
When something has been proved useful, it will reapear.
The very day of disappearance of search engines, will be the day when new ones would start popping up.
Since they are the organizers of information they are also the de facto gatekeepers for users who do not know how to discover knew content without them.