In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the time). So they are mostly giving up on the paradigm of providing links to information.
The next step will be Google or other companies in that space developing and deploying a new derogatory term for the web marking it as unclean, unruly, dangerous, bad (similar to “the Dark Web”) and making their abstraction the “safe” web.
If you do care about the web, about people’s ability to participate in it as more than mere passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De-googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don’t use the Chrome browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.
Liked it? Take a second to support tante on Patreon!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.