I’ve been thinking about the web and how it’ll change with the increasingly…uh…worrying decline of search. It feels like the order of their results can no longer be trusted, the web no longer reliably scraped. Instead, this essential tool we’ve relied on for more than two decades has halted all progress, reversed course. In a heart beat I would pick the search engine of 2014 over the one I use today.
So there’s a lot of anxiety out there about how this fundamentally changes the economics of the web. Folks are worried that without search functioning properly then the web itself is fading away, becoming irrelevant, or already even broken beyond repair. But I disagree! The premise at the heart of these conversations is that websites deserve and require a mass readership to be importan…
I’ve been thinking about the web and how it’ll change with the increasingly…uh…worrying decline of search. It feels like the order of their results can no longer be trusted, the web no longer reliably scraped. Instead, this essential tool we’ve relied on for more than two decades has halted all progress, reversed course. In a heart beat I would pick the search engine of 2014 over the one I use today.
So there’s a lot of anxiety out there about how this fundamentally changes the economics of the web. Folks are worried that without search functioning properly then the web itself is fading away, becoming irrelevant, or already even broken beyond repair. But I disagree! The premise at the heart of these conversations is that websites deserve and require a mass readership to be important or worthwhile. But what if they don’t?
Sure, a lot of businesses were built around the economics of search and ten billion people looking at a block of text imprisoned by a swamp of ads for cars and questionable dietary supplements. Although, that doesn’t mean the web itself requires that specific business model to thrive, to still be worthwhile, to still be important. My hot take here is that ugly business models created ugly websites, but I digress.
This idea has been rolling around my head since I started reading So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid where he writes: “It is worth asking, in the first place, whether all books need or deserve a mass readership.” Yikes! Whoa! This line hit me like a ton of bricks because most business models on the web have assumed a mass readership is out there—but what if it isn’t? What if the web, and most websites besides the few obvious exceptions, were instead more like book publishing? A few thousand dedicated readers out there, at best.
I can feel the disappointment in the conversations I’ve been listening to, as if the whole point of the web is to exist at bewildering, eye-watering scale. A million clicks is so lame, man, when compared to a billion. Heck, your website only gets fifty trillion clicks a day? Is there a point to publishing that dinky website if it’s so small?
But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.
And perhaps we should let our websites be small and private things once again.