Google declares the end of the World Wide Web
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 c...
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.
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.
Meanwhile they're hiding the Maps button and forcing you to use maps in situ on the main search page.
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
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.
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...
If the WWW was created by Google (it was not) I'm sure they would kill it like any of their other products.
Google does not have products, it just takes really long to delete prototypes.
I don't know, the last time I used Google search was about 12 years ago, I think.