The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It

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By Katie BakerAug. 4, 10:20 am UTC • 10 min

TechTechThe End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links. Now it’s rounding into its final form—and changing the internet forever.

Getty Images/Ringer illustration By Katie BakerAug. 4, 10:20 am UTC • 10 min

In every nook and cranny of the internet, at each and every moment of the day, you can find someone complaining that their go-to product up and changed the formula. Maybe their perfume has stronger sandalwood overtones than it used to, or their local snack shack switched up the breading on its chicken strips, or a specific pair of yoga pants absolutely did not used to be this see-through during downward dog! (Sorry, everyone.) And sometimes the product in question involves the basic nuts and bolts of the internet itself. By which I mean: Google used to be better, man. You don’t have to take that last one from a terminally online weirdo like me. There are plenty of serious businesspeople out there, with money and key performance indicators on the line, who would agree that lately, when it comes to the internet’s biggest and most powerful search engine, the formula has definitely changed. Like Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, who admitted on the tech news web show TBPN in May that his elite publishing house was already preparing for the worst when it came to the future of inbound traffic referrals from Google. “Last year, I told our teams: Assume there’s no search,” Lynch told the hosts. “You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.” He wasn’t alone in his proactive pessimism. Mike Reed, the CEO of USA Today, shared recently on the Rebooting Show podcast that at his company, “our plan is to assume search is gone and build our business in other ways.” Drastic times call for drastic projections, and as Reed phrased it in his interview, more than once: “The traditional Google Search model is broken.”

For the better part of the 21st century, for better and for worse, that traditional Google Search model was the engine of the internet, the cause of and solution to so many online delights and problems. Google hoovered up content, websites picked up traffic, and users got pages of search results that ranged from salient to spammy but were mostly straightforward enough to parse. In recent years, though, this status quo has been undergoing a significant change—one involving, you guessed it, artificial intelligence.

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Media Is Sports Journalism Dead? Plus: Google’s Killing Search and Fear and Loathing on the Wemby Beat. Is Sports Journalism Dead? Plus: Google’s Killing Search and Fear and Loathing on the Wemby Beat. Sports Journalism’s Death, Google’s Killing Search, and the Wemby Beat Sports Journalism, Google Search, and More

svg]:ui-size-6 ui-text-black ui-bg-brand-blue md:ui-flex ui-hidden" data-sentry-component="MediumIcon" data-sentry-source-file="medium-icon.tsx"> svg]:ui-size-6 ui-text-brand-blue ui-bg-transparent p-0 ui-flex md:ui-hidden" data-sentry-component="MediumIcon" data-sentry-source-file="medium-icon.tsx"> The Press Box The Press Box

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It was three years ago that the tech site The Verge got a look at some of Google’s newest...

The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It

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