No company is quite so inseparable from the World Wide Web as Google, which made searching the internet an eponymous verb. The web made Google rich, too, but this week Google relegated it to a submenu. In a design of its next-generation home page that the company showed at its annual I/O developer conference this [...]Read More...
What?
Web results only? As compared to what? AI results? What’s in the first tab? You’re… searching the web for results. What else would be in the first tab??
Edit: I haven’t used Google in a while. I just searched “who is Dr dre” on mobile. That’s a lot of boxes. Wikipedia box, albums box, songs box, people also search for box, videos box, you really gotta scroll down before you get to the results. Google doesn’t really link you to the answer anymore, it just answers you. Wow.
They took the guy who led the legendary team that made the search not only work instantly at a previously unimaginable scale, but also freakishly well from a “finding exactly what you wanted based on almost any query,” back in the late 2000s, if you remember… that guy, when he started pushing back against the people who wanted to fuck up search results to boost imaginary metrics that were theoretically (and, probably, not really) going to make more money from ads, they pushed him out.
This absolutely excellent article goes into detail about the exact moment, if you had to pick one, when Google stopped being a legendary tech company and simply became yet another behemoth coasting on its past successes until the market changes under it and it can’t adapt, fades, and takes its place with all the others, all the way back to IBM and DEC. Nothing’s changed in a big enough way for it to get knocked back into that obscurity yet, but it clearly will at some point.
Yep, very little of the main page is links anymore.
The article actually does make an interesting argument that the web is becoming a legacy format in favour of generative AI and social media interaction, and takes this as an example of that trend.
I hate this change. While these features are neat if I just want a quick answer for something like if I wanna know some random fact about a person, it makes it so much harder to do any level of actual research on something anymore because you have to dig through so much garbage to find the real content.
And Google isn’t alone in this. Bing and pretty much all of the big search engines are doing the same thing now. And while there are definitely alternative search engines out there, they lack the reach and rank sorting that Google and the other big players have already perfected.
So my options are either spend extra time with every search I perform by switching to various tabs and scrolling past auto-generated nonsense and sponsored results to find the answers I need, or use an objectively inferior product which may not even be able to point me to what I need within the first few pages of results. Neither option is a particularly great experience these days. The internet sucks so much lately.