Google’s broken link to the web

a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.

This new approach is captured elegantly in a slogan that appeared several times during Tuesday’s keynote: let Google do the Googling for you. It’s a phrase that identifies browsing the web — a task once considered entertaining enough that it was given the nickname “surfing” — as a chore, something better left to a bot.

This is what I said: when did surfing become doomscrolling?

Whatever labor funded the production of knowledge that it refers to goes unmentioned, and whatever sources it relies on go uncredited.

Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.

It’s kinda wild when you think about it. Google’s search engine now has an option to search the “web”, which is not the default anymore, and that kind of leaves you wondering: what am I even searching anymore?