Oh God, what happened?

Google revealed that they want to stop showing websites. Just a big chat bot window. No more blue links. And ever since, I've been thinking a lot. A little burnt out pixel, bouncing around in my head. And I think it's finally gathered enough other pixels for me to share it.

Google finally admitting that they want to stop showing websites feels like a stop on a long road. One I've been riding a bus on for years. I could feel how much they wanted to do this for a while. And I think we got here thanks to something I want to talk about. I'll explain it to people who aren't on the bus with me, which I imagine would be most of you reading this.

I started seriously making websites around 2015. I don't consider myself a programmer, but I know enough to help people with what they need to do. I used to call myself a web designer. And I still do, when I can tell people know what that might mean. Now I just say I help people make a website.

While I've been doing this, in the background, were these two narratives. Two snakes biting each other, over and over:

1. Websites are hard. Complex. And take a lot of skill and practice to build well.

2. Nobody goes to websites, do something else instead.

I saw the first point being used to justify making websites do all kinds of things. On the positive side it helped website builders improve accessibility. Add features that help people do what they want to do. Make sites more resilient. On the negative it could sometimes feel like the builders were inventing complications to keep our jobs. Dangling a carrot on a stick in front of ourselves. And justify the neat new technology we wanted to try out anyways. (Did you know you can render 3d in a web browser?)

Now we're at this weird point where I regularly see small websites built on tech meant for full blown apps. Is that bad? I don't know. But it definitely keeps the cost of your Squarespace subscription going up. And the thought of building a website very scary.

Which brings me to the second point: "nobody uses websites".

Out of the two, I think this is the one that's done more damage to what we thought the internet would be about. The people I've built websites with often say they want a "clean" or "minimal" or "simple" website. I can understand why. Sometimes it's because they've heard websites are complex. Other times they want the focus to be on their words or artwork. But it can often boil down to: "please make this website as little of a website as possible".

And I think this has had weird side effects. I rarely, if ever, see people excited about websites as a medium. Even after looking at the most creative, fascinating, and fun ones I've come across. To me, a website is a blank canvas. You can almost do anything with it. But people often don't. And I think it's because of these two narratives.

#1 makes it so that even the people that build websites are never able to talk about websites as art or craft. They're technical only, hyper utilitarian, and meant to be the most efficient billboards in the world. Hyper Calculators. Ultra Portfolios. One thing builders compare is how quickly their websites load. That is important, but I rarely see us asking each other: "yeah, but did anyone care about what loaded?"

#2 is what urges website makers to try and adapt to Google's rules. To spend hours tagging everything for Google's search bots to digest. To prime websites to be eaten by AI. Adding alt text to images when the people you work with don't know what that means. All to fight the worry that they've spent all this time, effort, and money on something nobody is going to look at. Sweating while they compare two sets of numbers. Website visitors (often given by Google Analytics) to social media views (handed to them by a social network). Assuming they mean the same thing. And not knowing which one includes more bots. Or knowing if any single one of them even remembered about what they were looking at five seconds later.

Bus Stop: now what?

Now we're here. Google's going to take all that work the website builders have done. All that complexity it's built on. Turn to the person doing the search and say: don't worry. We solved it for you. You don't ever have to go to those slow, weird, complex, overly clunky websites again.

Never mind that it's slow because ad code is screwed up due to Google being a monopoly.

Never mind that it's weird because Google forces recipe sites to write entire life stories to "show authority". To appease their vague guidelines.

And never mind that one reason it's complex and clunky is because it took a lot of work to appease Google's algorithm. Which might be the earliest example of "the algorithm" in the way we say that now. So in a very odd way, Google was the first social network. But just for websites. And the people making websites have been the “creators”. And the internet we’re all sitting in is one they strong armed into existence.

Now Google has found a chance to see if they can just get rid of websites altogether. To shake off the "free riders" and others hanging on to their majestic manes. As they ride off into the AI sunset.

I think we should let them ride off. A cliff. Far away from us.

Because there is a big world outside Google. The internet is bigger and stranger than you’d believe. Journalists have been bracing for what they called "Google Zero" for a bit now. The day Google stopped bringing their websites traffic altogether. And to them: it’s officially here. Meanwhile, more in my court, I think artists have been struggling with a similar or same problem for as long or longer. (Art, it turns out, is not easy to write keywords for.) And social media hasn’t solved this traffic problem for us either.

I just wish we all knew what our answer was.

I've been wanting to find a solution to this problem myself. Maybe the answer is the Fediverse. Bluesky, Mastodon, more. Where lots of us plug our little networks into each other's, making a big network of sites and people.

Maybe it's in person events and more face to face communication. Where we can see the people we talk to and listen to each other outside of automated systems. Organizations. Meetings. Panels.

Or maybe it's something I don't know about yet. Whatever it is. I really want to see it.

And I'd really like to not have to google it to find it.

- Kevin

A Few Links ~

I want a new search engine

If you want recommendations for search engines, here's a few:

1. Ecoasia

2. Duckduckgo lets you try to filter our AI results (I use this one)

3. And Kagi is a paid search engine that focuses on privacy and human first results

I want way less google please

If you want to remove even more google products from your life, Paris Marx has an amazing guide to get off US tech. 

And there’s even a whole subreddit dedicated to Degoogling.