Publishers are Not Innocent
The internet as we know it today is not merely a product of Google's relentless chase of money, it's the result of a lot of people's relentless chase of money.
During this episode of Search Engine, PJ and Casey kept coming back to the idea that Google thinks browsing the web is a chore, hence why they want to let AI do it for you. They, and much of the internet, seems to think that google is wrong here and, to their credit, Google is wrong about most things these days. But, in 2024, browsing the web certainly is a chore. It sucks!
Unless you spend the time to carefully curate an RSS feed or a list of bookmarks to regularly check up on[1], browsing the web is quite terrible. The infamous personal essays that preclude what could have been simple recipes, the almost useless "Can Pikachu be Shiny in Pokemon GO?" articles, those horrible product spec sheet comparison sites, and immeasurable amounts of other detritus have mucked up the internet such that it takes a great force of will to get any value out of it.
Let me be abundantly clear: the answer to this problem is definitely not AI. Google is definitely wrong about that part. However, at least part of the solution has to be taking the profit out of “What time is the Super Bowl?" posts and putting into good content.
Google incentivized the SEO chum to take over the web and got rich doing it, but publishers played the same game. Much like tech companies during the pandemic, they were either so naive as to not see the end state of their actions or, more likely, simply didn't care about anything beyond next quarter's financials. Together, the likes of Conde Nast, Google, and countless others destroyed everything great that any of them created.
And now, Google is poised to eat its own tail. The media industry is currently in shambles because Google finally realized that people don't like SEO slop, and the companies that got fat on making it no longer have any idea how to make money without their favorite crutch. Journalists are being laid off in droves while Google tells us to put glue on pizza. At this rate, there will soon be no content left to shovel into the gaping maw of the LLMs.
Maybe, as Casey suggests in the episode, the Fediverse is the answer. Maybe email newsletters will save us. But, it took more than Google to ruin the internet.
I highly recommend both options as a way to remain sane these days. ↩︎