Editorial – Brave new web, whatever happened to getting lost?

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Whatever it was that sparked your interest, from obscure historical events to half-remembered song lyrics, you could just type a few words into a search engine and disappear into a rabbit hole for hours on end. The results were messy, unpredictable, and often wonderful. Stray questions could carry you through dozens of tabs sitting side to side: established newspapers alongside quirked-up bloggers, university archives next to fan-made archives, experts sharing findings beside nameless strangers obsessively documenting niche interests. The web did not present itself as a single voice. You never knew exactly what you'd end up with, only that there would always be somewhere else to click.

It's difficult to grasp, but this experience of getting lost in the essentially human-made internet has been progressively diluted ever since AI, LLMs in particular, started sneaking into our digital sphere.

It starts with the fact that, unless you make sure to add "-AI" to your query, you are handed automated AI summaries. Whilst it may be convenient for quick overviews – catering to a quintessentially contemporary appetite for convenience that treats the active process of reading and cross-referencing as a negligible point of friction – it completely depletes the joy of figuring things out on your own. It robs us of deciding for ourselves which sources to trust, or bookmarking particularly intriguing pages to stay up-to-date. Different studies point towards a quickly growing increase in zero-click searches (the more so once an AI summary conveniently pops up), which makes perfect sense when considering that our minds are naturally inclined to act as cognitive misers, seeking to be as simple and efficient as possible when it comes to solving problems of any kind.

Then, last year, AI mode has been introduced to the search bar. According to Google's head of search, Liz Reid, the tool has recently surpassed one billion monthly users. With numbers like that, it's not all too surprising that at this year's Google I/O Developers Conference, Google announced that it would restructure its search interface for the first time in 25 years. The familiar search bar is morphing into an ongoing conversational companion capable of processing multimodal input, too. Even within AI overviews themselves, you can ask follow-up questions, and search itself now integrates generated interactive graphics on the results page instead of pointing towards links to websites that actually built them.

The argument made is virtually that people want faster answers and that search has always evolved – but we do, after all, live in a market economy, and market economies are rarely ever just about what consumers want. This total re-engineering isn't happening because Google cares about improving your research experience. It is happening because Google is fighting to remain competitive in an ecosystem it otherwise may risk losing control. OpenAI's ChatGPT is, regrettably so, increasingly treated as a default research tool, by now reporting 900 million weekly users; and since the absolute lion's share of Alphabet's revenue engine still comes from traditional search advertising, adaptation should feel necessary for survival. By embedding Gemini directly into the exact front page billions of people open by habit, Google successfully clings to relevance; but all of that comes with a catch for everybody else involved. It may mark the first step towards an aggressive monopolisation of the open web, where digital traffic more and more starts with a visit to Google – and ends exactly there.

For decades, humans have been typing out content – surely not always the most high-quality and reliable one, either, but genuinely and recognisably human content, with all its stylistic perks and intricacies and off-tangents. Said content was indexed by search engines, so users can click through. The simple act of clicking on a link generated the ad impressions and subscription revenues that allowed creators to keep writing, and want to do so, in the first place. But by turning search into a closed loop, Google is breaking that economic contract.