Google says adding more AI to its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites. One thing is clear: this era of online history is closing.
We're soon going to end up back in the early/mid 90s where the only way to find something is via a internet yellowpages.. only this time, not because search engines dont exist yet, but because they are completely worthless garbage.
Unpopular opinion: The missing business model for websites is killing the web. If there was a platform that would distribute a monthly fee to the websites we visit, the web would be much better.
50% could be allocated through traffic, 50% by choice. I could pay 20€ a month for example. Some would go to lemmy, some to my local newspaper, some to my favorite YouTube channels, authors or bloggers.
If enough people did this, investigative journalism would be funded, product testers wouldn't be reliant on sponsoring and hobbyists could gain serious funding without selling out.
All it would take would be a platform that handles the payment and supplies a tracking pixel. Websites could join and become part of it. At the moment, every single publisher has their own payment solution. If I want to read one local article from Houston today and one from Tokyo tomorrow, I won't join two payment plans. I want them to be paid automatically, like when I play a song on Spotify or watch a video on YouTube. Just a decent amount of money instead of paying mostly middlemen.
I would love a if there was a standard websites would use to receive donations. An integrated browser addon that track what you visit and gives you a review before distributing funds after each month would be great. It should accumulate money to avoid transaction fees for tiny amounts.
I recommend Kagi. It is a search engine with absolutely no tracking or ads, AI slop filter, an in-house index and a cute doggo. It's a paid search engine (which means you pay with money not with data), but you can give it a try with 300 free searches with no strings attached.
Google search engine has been shit for a decade or more. Wasn't there some document that it was made so by purpose, because there was no incentive to improve it becuse there was no real competition or the competition was just a front-end to google.
2018-2019 is when they officially turned the corner and decided to focus only on ad revenue. But the SEO abuse dove it into the ground by 2014ish. They were making money enough to expand by orders of magnitude into other areas, so they simply didn't want to tweak their search or strategy and kill their golden goose that funded things like Good Drive and their shit social network and loon, etc.