End of the WWW

 Google announces the end of the WWW 

Just imagine how far Google search had come from the original WWW page. We've long been familiar with Google's callous, almost anti-intellectual and anti-humanist relation to the value of knowledge and culture by it's willingness to put advertisers' opinions above common facts and to ride roughshod over the values of its users as seen in the famous Google Graveyard. 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 Google relegated it to a submenu. In a design of its next-generation home page which the company showed at its annual I/O developer conference, the demotion is quite clear. Seemingly for years, Google search has been in decline. 

Research now confirms it. A longitudinal study of SEO search engine spam by Leipzig University shows Google search returns low-quality nonsense generated by AI robots. For everyone, a better take is simply that the Web Grew Up. Recently Google search has become increasingly useless. Key search terms are ignored completely as are search operators such as quotation marks, plus and negative signs, etc. Even switching to verbatim rarely helps. Searching now returns a blancmange of content in special pull-out boxes, apps and features, some of it artificially generated. The days of lists of links are over,if you want to see web pages the tech giant now offers a “new ‘Web’ filter” which will refine your search to only see web pages. This may startle Generation Xers whose first taste of the online world was via a web browser, but the web has become a legacy format like the DVD. Anyway, finally in 2024 Google made it official; it's splitting up with "The World Wide Web". Or rather, like someone sensing they are about to be dumped, who rage-quits a relationship first, Google decided to jump rather than be pushed.

The high hopes of the web really began three decades ago. In the spring of 1994, online communities consisted of services such as bulletin boards, which were either expensive or difficult to use, as were the first internet searching tools like Gopher. But in the mid-Nineties, users launching the new Mosaic browser could soon discover how simple it was to produce these early mixed-media pages: now, anyone could publish anything. This caused particular excitement among progressives. Here was a mechanism to bypass “big media” and the false consciousness it purportedly created for the masses. Radio had also started as a two-way communication system, but now the web offered publishing at a radically lower cost. It gave a pamphleteer the same profile as Condé Nast. The promise of the web explains the subsequent determination to keep the internet “free” or “open”.

Google started life as an index, built by crawlers. It's unique selling point in the 1990s was a filtering algorithm which reliably selected more relevant content based on the link-degree. But Google was soon uncomfortable with that. For one thing, they do not get to control the content, only filter it. That's annoying when your business model is placing advertisements rather than charging content creators or seekers. Other than the laughable "Don't be evil" motto, people relate to Google by their quest to "Organize the world's information…". The media’s fetishisation of the web was not always shared by the public. For example, in 2002 the BBC conducted a public poll to nominate the greatest living Britons, and Corporation staff insisted that the protocol’s co-inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee should be one of the 100 nominees. To their dismay, he came 99th.

Today’s youngster's, neither know nor care what “the web” is. They were born into mobiles and social media, and see no interest in reviving it as a semi-ironic cottage core medium, like the cassette tape. Web utopianism is strictly a Gen-X media phenomenon. But, in reality, Google’s interest in the web has been diminishing for a very long time. Articles lamenting its demise have been appearing since Wired’s tastemaker in chief Chris Anderson proclaimed the web “dead” in 2010. Berners-Lee regularly issues manifestos to “save” the web, and nobody pays any attention. Today, over 80% of Facebook’s two billion daily users access the social network only via a phone. Businesses no longer feel obliged to create websites. Much of what’s left is tawdry and dying.

But that implies more than mere indexing. For one thing, it implies that said "information" belongs to the world, at least if possessive apostrophes still count for anything. Truth is, Google always had bigger ambitions. What Google always wanted to be is an Oracle, and AI has made that seem possible. The words from an Oracle, from the Latin "to speak", are utterances of a priest or priestess giving wise counsel. Unfortunately for Google that name is taken, but the mythological function is still up for grabs. Google is currently erecting a wall between the searcher and the information they seek, using Generative AI, which the company believes creates more useful results such as summaries. This barrier, consisting of what Google’s former research director Meredith Whittaker calls “derivative content paste”, causes problems: what’s generated may or may not resemble the original, thanks to additional errors and “hallucinations”. The new barrier also removes the creators of original material from the value chain. The world was never as exciting as we were promised by the web utopians; now, it will be blander than ever.

One must compare and contrast this with the network of information those like Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Ted Nelson envisaged as a knowledge commons and peer exchange mechanism. These are not remotely the same thing. The latter clearly sets itself up as an authority, and in that sense Google would be better rewriting their motto (yet again) to something like "To control and define world knowledge". Many scientists see this trajectory by Google as regressive. It reverses centuries of Post-Enlightenment scientific method and open, peer publishing that sought to break the spell of Oracles and authoritarian centres of information power.

A grave problem is that Oracles, Seers and "wise priests" have always had immense power over the tribe, to select kings and even take the tribe to war. They are fundamentally undemocratic. But many businesses and online communities will be rejoicing at the news of Google exiting the WWW. For too long it has dominated search and spoiled the web by twisting its values. Now there is room for the myriad alternatives waiting in the wings… who should move fast to reclaim the ground Google is giving up, and before it realises that its Oracle is unreliable for all.