We're soon going to end up back in the early/mid 90s where the only way to find something is via a internet yellowpages.. only this time, not because search engines dont exist yet, but because they are completely worthless garbage.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Man I miss the old internet..
Someone posted this the other day: https://goodinternetmagazine.com/building-a-slow-web/
I really liked the idea so I quickly made my personal site and put it on the indie webring. It's a tiny community but it's there.
Unpopular opinion: The missing business model for websites is killing the web. If there was a platform that would distribute a monthly fee to the websites we visit, the web would be much better.
50% could be allocated through traffic, 50% by choice. I could pay 20€ a month for example. Some would go to lemmy, some to my local newspaper, some to my favorite YouTube channels, authors or bloggers.
If enough people did this, investigative journalism would be funded, product testers wouldn't be reliant on sponsoring and hobbyists could gain serious funding without selling out.
This sounds exactly like what Brave is/was supposed to be/could have been.
I would love a if there was a standard websites would use to receive donations. An integrated browser addon that track what you visit and gives you a review before distributing funds after each month would be great. It should accumulate money to avoid transaction fees for tiny amounts.
Google disagrees. In fact, the company tells the BBC that AI Overviews have been good for the web, and AI Mode will be no different. Google insists these features send users to "a greater diversity of websites" and the traffic is "higher quality" because people spend more time on the links they click.
However, the company hasn't provided data to back up these claims.
This is how we know they are lying.
More time per click is such a useless metric for the end user.
Google disagrees. In fact, the company tells the BBC “Trust us, bro.”
Non-AI summary.
Damn, thats fuckin' metal, bro. Also, the text to gif gave me a flashback of ~15 years ago.
feels like its 1998 and I'm listening to MTV while browsing the web on AOL with that gif, lol
the web is already destroyed with all the spam, commercial crap, tracking and spying
But the people making money off of all of that are mad now, hence this article.
Yeah. smallest violin plays in the distance
At this point, I'm pretty sure the violinist is on our side, and is no longer to playing for them.
What is dead may never die.
I haven't used Google Search in quite a while. It's frankly unusable for finding any useful information for someone like me.
“About to”?
Not sure about the web but Google can for sure Yahoo themselves out of existence.
I miss Yahoo games.
Google only has one game, and it's not even multiplayer. :/
Yahoo games and clubs, groups and search, chat and messenger that had filesharing and video and allowed cross fertilisation between everything. It was becoming the internet, it was set to buy Google and then it just stopped and closed it all down.
Japanese people: oh not again
Google search engine has been shit for a decade or more. Wasn't there some document that it was made so by purpose, because there was no incentive to improve it becuse there was no real competition or the competition was just a front-end to google.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
I'm not a huge fan of Ed Zitron generally, he leans towards histrionic too much for my tastes, but he makes a compelling case here.
histrionic
True... yet nearly everybody else, maybe beside few like 404 media, seems to be either boot licking or access "journalism" so I get the "spicy" take.
2018-2019 is when they officially turned the corner and decided to focus only on ad revenue. But the SEO abuse dove it into the ground by 2014ish. They were making money enough to expand by orders of magnitude into other areas, so they simply didn't want to tweak their search or strategy and kill their golden goose that funded things like Good Drive and their shit social network and loon, etc.
I called this one pretty early on. Let's see if it catches on or tanks the Goog.
Cool, I'll just ditch Google at work as well, then