A lot has been said and written about Google I/O that happened last month, starting with the bizarre DJ act and the cringiness—and lack of soul—of the whole event. Among the major breakthroughs around their AI products and strategy was a significant shift in their core business: Search. Following the steps of products like Perplexity and Arc Search, Google announced “Updates that make Search do the work for you”.
“Doing the work for us” means asking Google what we need and having them provide us directly with the answer, instead of showing us the pages that could help. Perplexity had already introduced this concept as their main product feature, and Arc Search brought us the idea of creating pages dynamically based on our search needs. Google’s announcement means that this concept is finally mainstream.
This represents a major shift for the web as we know it, moving from navigating multiple web pages to find answers or even the questions, to getting the answer directly from the search engine. There will be no search, or at least this seems to be their goal.
The Search Engine will become the web—and considering that Google owns Chrome, Microsoft owns Bing, and Arc from The Browsing Company owns Arc Search—the browser itself wants to become the web. This brings up two major conflicts: one ethical and the other more sentimental.
On the ethical side, search engines, which have created multi-billion-dollar businesses around advertising to make business web pages appear at the top of their search results, are now ditching those pages by providing fully processed answers—sometimes whole websites—generated by AI. This shift threatens media companies and smaller businesses that rely on SEO to reach users. How do you optimize search in the era of AI?
Worse, these algorithms have been trained on decades of public content created by us—regular internet users—and particularly by those media companies now seeing their business threatened by the technology that depends on them to learn. This creates a classic chicken-and-egg problem: AI needs more news and creative material to learn, but it simultaneously puts at risk the jobs of those who produce this content. This issue is not being addressed by major players in the sector and could affect millions of jobs, businesses, and, more critically, weaken our democracy.
Then there’s the sentimental side. Born in the ’80s and introduced to the web in the late ‘90s, I remember the thrill of navigating dozens of websites and discovering things I didn’t know existed or wasn’t even searching for. I remember trying multiple search engines with the same prompts, hoping to find something new. Back then, algorithms weren’t as sophisticated, so the probability of serendipitous discoveries was quite high.
I also remember the excitement of having my own website and showing it off to friends at school. First using Geosites, then Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and by copying ideas and HTML from other websites, I learned, one tag at a time, how to manipulate basic HTML websites. This developed into a passion that led me to study Computer Science and become a Software Engineer.
All that thrill has already been majorly impacted by Social Networks—where everyone has their own identity within this network of pages controlled by one company—and now seems to be threatened further by the use of AI.
I consider myself quite progressive and open-minded and don’t want to sound like those old guys who say, “in my time things were better.” I am excited about the possibilities AI can bring in fields like Health, Climate Change, or by enabling more people to learn how to build stuff, fostering a world driven by creativity. But I have reservations about the limits of such innovations to avoid weakening democracies and making us slower and lazier. I also want to help preserve the web I experienced and learned to love—even if it’s a niche thing—and writing this is a first step.
Thoughts on this essay are heavily influenced by recent episodes of the podcast The Search Engine, particular this episode. You should listen to them and subscribe their podcast.