The web, “the web” and Google
Listening to Nilay on The Vergecast yesterday, something hit me. There is merit to when people say that the web’s never been more relevant than before. With the Apple ruling that payments on the web should be possible and Google’s own anti-trust trial, the web truly is more important.
It’s where the content and the commerce exist now. The platform has no gate keepers and has never had commerce gatekeepers.
So, when Nilay claims that the web as we think of will change and that Google’s driving away the web that they helped fund and create, he is referring to the large publishers on the Internet.
I honestly think that I am okay with that change. Even within large publishers who are now funded by ads there were the greats that always created a destination and their audience and the ones that were driven by search traffic. I hear that the search traffic might disappear. Again, search like how we did it. IMO, search itself is changing – and like any large scale change, it will first be slow and then dramatic.
Whether that will harm Google’s business model is an orthogonal question. And irrelevant to this post.
Here, I want to call out that large publishers existed before the web. And chose to move to the web. However, the independent website was the one native to the web. Those websites existed before google as a search engine and will continue to exist after Google in its gemini era.
To me, the web is and always was the group of people making interesting things, publishing their own blogs, creating interesting applications and a distribution platform that truly cannot be controlled by anyone. So, with the upcoming rise of AI, I really don’t think of the web as dying. If anything, I feel like the web is growing ever bigger.
Search itself has changed to the demands of what people searching have placed on it and there’s an optimistic case for Google that as long as they are willing to roll with those changes, they are going to be okay. And so will the web.
tl;dr- The web consists of websites. “The web,” is a set of large publishers that get traffic because of the work they do in providing news. Search is larger than news. And the web will outlast both search, google and “the web.”
