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Google declares the end of the World Wide Web

https://unherd.com/newsroom/google-declares-the-end-of-the-world-wide-web/

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...

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arrowMace

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Clickbait headline. What Google did was add a new tab for web results (only) in their search page, similar to images and news.

I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search "results" page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can't find actual links anymore.

riquisimo

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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.

mozz

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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.

Gsus4

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Yea, sounds like the familiar managerialist games enshittifying everything once again.

But I guess the progression focus along engineering -> sales -> finance of corporate lifecycles as markets saturate and profit margins are squeezed, particularly now in competition with high interest rates.

arrowMace

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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.

Chozo

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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.

dmention7

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I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search "results" page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can't find actual links anymore.

Personally, and In principle at least, this makes sense. About half of my web searches are looking for a quick answer to a question (what's the per pound cook time for a frozen turkey?), so having that answer highlighted and summarized alongside the source is very useful. It's actually the minority of the time that what I really want is a link to an external resource.

The effectiveness of that implementation and the accuracy of the summarized info is a whole other topic...

TWeaK

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Meanwhile they're hiding the Maps button and forcing you to use maps in situ on the main search page.

eatthecake

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Well thanks, that explains why my search suddenly went to shit last week. The web tab is all the way to the right so out of sight. I don't suppose there's a firefox extension to auto select web.. i know nothing about these things

ZapBeebz_

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I'm sure there will be in the coming weeks. It's just a brand new change, so no one has published an extension yet. I did learn you can block the ai results with uBlock origin, however, so that's huge.

eatthecake

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I got ublacklist and got rid of tiktok and instagram immediately but i still dislike the whole format. Tried a bunch of other search engines and they all seemed pretty similar.

logi

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You can probably update the, search url template for Google in the Firefox settings to go to the Web tab. Or make a new one and make it default.

tyler

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Just use kagi. Statistically better.

ThillyGooth

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Most normies will never pay for a search engine. I've tried and tried to show them the advantages of Kagi but the value just isn't there for them. I ditched Google for Kagi long ago and I couldn't be happier.