Will we still be Googling things in 10 years?

2.3

More Google ruminating. Sorry I missed two weeks. Appreciate the patience.

🌟 Feature

Will we still be Googling things in 10 years? 20? 50?

I’m not so certain that the answer is yes. At least we might not be googling in the way we do now. As I’ve written about before, there are regulatory pressures on the companies that make the internet what it is that may change how consumers engage with it, but there is also the introduction of generative AI into our regular technological behavior.

If you think about it, the learned behavior of Google search is kind of…odd? Like the common searcher is just typing in words like “paul rudd height” or “yankees score,” and then a bunch of results pop up. The results you see are based on a couple things: whether Google has its own feature that shows the info you want, like the weather or a sports score, whether someone has paid Google to appear under links labelled as ads, or whether a massive undertaking of search engine optimization has occurred on the other end, perhaps in the hands of celebrity heights dot com or whatever.

While Google has spent decades creating a situation where you practically never have to scroll too far down the page to find what you are looking for, the basic skeleton of accessing the world’s information has remained the same. Empty text box, user types an input, Google serves up outputs.

But Google is not the best place to do searches. It’s the best place at being a general search engine, but it often just leads you to search (or searches for you) on other platforms, like YouTube, Wikipedia, or Twitter.

Both the anti-trust regulation and advent of AI in search introduce an interesting challenge to our collective learned behavior of “looking things up.” In the case of the regulation, Google may be forced to play nicer with competing search engines, like Bing, which would inherently introduce a sort of decentralization of access to information on the internet. You can imagine, for example, certain information being more readily available on Bing than on Google. The following example has not happened, but imagine that Google wanted to stifle bad press about itself. It could do so on its own platform, but Bing could knock it to the top of every search.

In the case of AI in search, the access that different search engines could have to information could vary, such that the data one search AI brings up differs from another. For example, Search Engine A could cut a deal with the academic database JSTOR to make its entire catalogue processable to Search Engine A’s AI. Search Engine B might not have such a luxury. This way different search companies would have to compete (I know, novel concept) for users.

Information wants to be free, it wants to be as easily accessible as possible. And when one company determines the flow of that information, there is an inherent imbalance in who gets to control what and where information is transferred.

I have this feeling, somewhat supported by current events, that the way we access information is about to dramatically change, and that we’ll be talking about how we googled things like how people talk about changing the channel on a TV without a remote. We are not in the future, the future is only just beginning.

📚 Reading list

⚡️ Lightning

I pulled the trigger on buying a Meta Quest 3 yesterday. It is a strange and marvelous experience so far.
I started paying for ChatGPT-4 this week and mapped the app to the action button on my iPhone. For more complex questions than a Google search can handle I’ve been using that exclusively. It rules.
I staunchly believe that public information should be free on the internet, but I am compelled by a market of paid tools that help people access that free information.
I really want this insane lil gadget:

📕 Glossary

Nothing this week!

📱 Home Screen

This week we have the homescreen of my beautiful fiancé, Mariah. Let’s dive in.

I think folders on the iPhone are a disaster. I’m not saying Mariah’s in particular, I am saying the general UI/UX of them. I don’t know what would be better, but I think they just might be too small, too cluttered, and too heavy on gestures.
34 missed calls and voicemails is insane. None of them are even from me.
- But you already know I hate the red badge icons.
I love her widgets. I think that top left one is a workout app? I’m assuming this is its inactive state, and its very pleasant.
I count 51 different apps on this screen? I absolutely could not.

Now for some thoughts from her (text modified to fully encapsulate Mariah’s artistic voice):

i know that this is not the first screen that opens on your phone.

….no, it’s not. but it’s the one i keep open.

why didn’t you show your real home screen?

well it’s just the one they give you. i keep all that stuff there so i don’t lose those apps, but i swipe to this screen as my main home screen.

you know you can just switch the pages themselves right?

i know but don’t like that, and you already told me i can do that. and i want that to be on the record. and i want that i told you i want it to be on the record on the record.

what’s your favorite app on this screen?

you can’t see it on the screen but it’s called Tab. it’s this app where you scan your receipt and it inputs all the items’ prices and tax and everything. and then you can split it up by what people actually had, and it splits the tax and tip up proportionally too. i find it really hard to be the person who has to venmo people but this has made it a lot easier.

what’s your least favorite app but one you need to have?

it’s a tie…between Canvas and Goodreads. Canvas creates so much unnecessary full screen changes that take SO long to download when they really should not. also what I hate about the mobile is it makes it really hard to adjust settings that are very easy on the browser which is counterintuitive to having a mobile app in the first place. Goodreads has pretty much not changed anything since i was a sophomore in high school. it makes me feel as if i am accessing the internet from a nintendo DS.

☎️ Answers