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.