Episode 49: Destination Websites, Future of the Web

Transcript

I'm going to do a little bit of futurist predicting here, near-futurist predicting.
We're talking about the, I don't know, 5- to 10-year range, something like that.
I was listening to an episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home, which is generally, generally speaking, it's a news show, technology news show.
It covers a lot of, you know, up-and-coming technology, but also, like, sort of the business behind technology and some stuff like that.
Daily show, you know, I'm going to link to the episode that I'm talking about specifically.
But in this particular episode, the last, I don't know, 6-8 minutes, something like that, the host starts talking about, well, the springboard topic is that,
web search traffic is losing market share to things like chat GPT and perplexity and that sort of thing.
So the idea being that some portion of traffic being sent to websites is no, that used to be sent from search engines, like, let's be honest, Google predominantly.
That traffic is now coming from answers that are found inside of LLM chatbots, basically.
So I'm sure you've seen this, you know, if you use chat GPT or whatever.
However, if it doesn't necessarily have the information you're looking for directly in its own model, it will go out and do some amount of web searching quickly to try to piece together an answer on the fly.
And then it will give you references.
And also sometimes you'll get this if it's if you're just asking something that needs a reference, that kind of thing.
And it'll link you out to a website.
So some amount of traffic now is coming from that workflow where people are using, say, chat GPT.
They ask it questions, shoots you out to a website via like a reference link, basically.
So Google is losing market share on this.
Now, he goes into a lot of interesting analysis about this.
He talks a bit about perhaps the timing.
Google is under some scrutiny right now of having to break up some of its web properties.
Perhaps there's some fortuitous timing there.
He talks a bit about the AI search results that are popping up with Google, that Google is actually fairly well positioned to make this transition.
He talks about the other massive platforms that are sitting underneath the Google or Alphabet umbrella.
So he goes into a whole analysis around this and has sort of his own essay at the end of this episode.
So I'd encourage you to take a listen to that.
But it got me thinking, well, this is a topic that has been swirling in my head for a little while as well.
And I wanted to put some thoughts out there on where I think some of this is going.
When the web, quote unquote, came out, when it really became in the public eye, you know, we're talking about the 90s, you know, mid to late 90s, really.
Um, I was obsessed with it.
I loved the web from day one.
Having all of this information and to a certain extent entertainment and increasingly over time entertainment and just resources and other people's points of view, like all of this was so intriguing to me.
I was obsessed with it.
Eventually, I went into it professionally.
Not that I spent all that time in the middle focusing on the web.
But eventually, when I ended up working through a master's degree in computer science, what I chose to apply that to and what I was most excited to apply that to was web development.
Really all the way through, right, front end stuff, back end stuff, even server stuff, like anything within a web stack, because I found that the output of that, the product of that, you know, a website or a web app was really one of the just the most amazing things that a person could produce digitally.
It fascinated me far more than an app or a desktop application or data analytics, I don't know, any of these other things, right?
The ability to take, to create a product that you then put out in the world as a website and have other people be able to access that freely was everything to me in some ways.
Over time, you know, between the time that I really started doing that professionally and the last few years, I do think that we as a society have ruined the platform that is the web.
Like, we've really, we've really destroyed, in some ways, its original intent.
And not even its original intent, but just the things that were great about it, right?
Like, that open freeness of information and so on and so forth, a lot of it is now just, it became, the businesses, and I get it, right, businesses had to make money on this somehow.
So it became all about advertising.
And as soon as you do the advertising thing, then we learned how to do the behavioral tracking and analysis kind of stuff, which then gave us more ads and ads, ads, ads, ads, ads everywhere.
And then the holy grail became services and SaaS and, you know, you're paying 40,000 subscriptions to do anything anymore.
And it's cluttered and you get to websites and there's pop-ups about cookies and there's pop-ups about newsletters and there's pop-ups about this and that.
Like, back, I remember, you know, back in the 90s, when you'd get these pop-ups and it was like a running joke because they were so, they were spamming.
I mean, at that time, it was like JavaScript malware kind of exploits and stuff.
Now it's intentional.
Like, we got rid of all of that through cleaning up browser security protocols.
And then we replaced it with our own crap instead, right?
We just spam our users with, join my newsletter and do you want to subscribe?
And, you know, as soon as you scroll on a page, something pops up.
And then we got GDPR with accepting cookies and, like, the whole experience of using the web had a sweet spot.
It was like that, like, I don't know, let's call it, like, 2006, 7 through, like, I don't know, 2014, 15, maybe?
Something like that.
Somewhere in that chunk.
Maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later.
But, you know, give or take a couple years, there was a sweet spot there.
Now, I think it's not a hot take to say that Google ran the web, right?
If it was not for Google, no one, well, I'm sure some other company would do these things.
But they came out and did a lot of, they pioneered a lot of stuff.
They made the best search engine to get people where they were going.
For a long time, it was not as spammy and sponsored as it is these days.
They kept that under wraps for many years.
Or under control, I should say.
I'm not saying they did everything, you know, wonderfully well or anything or altruistically.
But they, as a society, they really pushed us forward.
I don't think that's a point that anyone can really argue with.
And they did it primarily on the back of this search technology.
Which is now showing early signs of what will likely become a trend downward.
Where that business will not be all that important.
Or it will decrease in importance over time.
So this brings me to, now, let's, well, there's a few ways to go with this, right?
I just want to make a note.
So think about YouTube for a second.
And just put that aside.
Like, just, we're just going to put a pin in that.
Because that's going to become important, I think, in my point.
But YouTube is just a gangbusters platform.
It just grows, it continues to grow at crazy rates.
More and more content is being shoveled through there.
We can argue a little bit about the, how great that content's becoming over time.
But it's an enormous platform.
That's on the upswing.
Continues to be.
So just put a pin on that for a second and we'll come back to it.
Imagine a world where search is no longer Google's primary business.
That would mean, most likely, that they would stop putting as much effort into the search.
There will be less budget allocated to it.
There will be less effort put into it.
And as that continues over time, it kind of becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
If you assume that search will become less important, then you can probably also assume that search will evolve at a slower pace.
And the quality will, over time, probably decrease, or at least not increase the way it always has.
And over time, search will just get worse.
Not to say that search will go away.
And it's completely reasonable to assume that other companies will step in and do some of this stuff.
But it's really hard to make a business out of that in today's world if your volume of traffic is on the decline, right?
If you're not growing, if the industry is not growing, it is shrinking, which with the advent of LLMs and references and all this kind of stuff, it absolutely appears to begin going in that direction.
And if that's the trend, it will be harder and harder to find funding and budget and good engineers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So let's just assume for a second that a world will come where search has gotten significantly worse and that people largely try to avoid what we have always thought of as the web search engine, quote unquote.
So, what might be relevant or what might become relevant in a world like that?
This is where I want to unpin YouTube as an example.
What makes YouTube different, and you could say other platforms too, you could talk about a Facebook, a lot of social media actually, so Facebook, Instagram, stuff like that.
But what makes YouTube different and less vulnerable to a decline in search is that YouTube is a primary platform.
And what I mean by that is it is a destination platform that people go to.
People will go to YouTube.
For a long time, the way people have gotten to, say, mom and pop's business website or so-and-so's personal blog or whatever was through finding it through search.
Hence, all of the race for SEO and, you know, trying to gain the system and keywording and all this stuff.
But if search is on the decline, those gains go away or they at least decrease in relevance.
But something like a YouTube, where people go there to do the thing or view the thing, it becomes a destination platform.
And in some ways, I think this is almost going to cycle back around to where the web was when it started.
Before Google was the giant and keywording and SEO and all that kind of stuff was as pervasive as it has been in the last 10, 15 years.
Before all that, there were more destination platforms.
And also before social media, because social media also becomes this springboard to go into other things.
There were websites that people would go to for content, not because they found it through a social media platform, because those didn't exist yet.
Not because, you know, they showed up in the search results, because they weren't SEO optimized and stuff.
People just knew of certain websites that were worth going to, to check things out.
I remember some of the ones that were more comical.
And of course, I'm blanking on all of their names right now.
But there were some things out there.
I remember like board.com and something, Battlegrounds, Battlefield, I forget.
But there were a few types of like, sort of like comedy entertainment sites that people would go to.
But there were other places too, where people would go to websites and see what the update from the week was, or the update from the day was.
And they weren't built around keywording, they were built around content.
They were just built around giving funny, interesting, good, valuable stuff on a routine basis.
This is what blogs were built on.
Before social media and stuff, blogs were like, people found blogs that they really liked, and they would go back to them to check them out.
So if I'm putting on, I don't know, I have some hope here.
Because I've felt a little unhopeful over the last several years in particular around the web, the direction it has gone.
All of the tracking, all of the keywording, all of the SEO, dead internet theory, all the advertisements, all the pop-ups, all the subscriptions.
Like, you name it, the whole trend.
But it has become this self-feeding, you know, feedback loop kind of thing, where it just, it's like an engine.
It needs these components to keep going, to keep paying people.
But in a world where search goes away, or decreases in relevance, or just isn't looked at that fondly anymore.
And in a world where the Q&A sort of version of search, right, where you would used to go to Google and say, like, you know, what are five things that do such and such?
That stuff is going to largely just seem to be handled by LLMs anymore, your chat GPTs and whatever else.
If what you're left with is a web that, again, becomes designed for interesting content, because it can be.
Because it no longer needs the keywording, because there's no search game to play anymore.
And I think there is something to be said where this might, I have some hope that the web has a redemption path here.
And that people who create interesting websites could become relevant again as destination websites that people check regularly, because they have interesting stuff that an LLM just can't give you.
Now, I'm sure there's a lot of counterpoints to this.
One of the ones that comes to mind for me immediately is, okay, well, we're going to give up the SEO game for search, fine, but likely it will be replaced by some new quote-unquote SEO game for LLMs.
Agreed.
Like, I can't, I don't have a, I can't refute that.
However, I just have some hope, and maybe that's all this is.
Maybe I have some hope that we'll see a web again in the next five to ten years that's centered around people who make interesting stuff being destinations, not just a click-through on a reel, or playing a game of SEO, or paying for people to show up, or whatever.
And maybe that's just a little too, you know, maybe I'm just being an optimist, I don't know.
But I think if you are someone who has been sitting on an idea that you want to do, that you've wanted to put on the web, now's probably a good time to start that up.
And start publicizing it a little bit through social media and whatever else you do, but to start pushing people in a direction of something interesting that you're making.
Because it could be that as things change here and people's behaviors shift, that idea of a destination website, a bookmarked website in someone's browser, might become a lot more pervasive or a lot more common again.
So if you're sitting on an idea for some interesting stuff that you would have put on the web 20 years ago, but you never did, maybe now's a good time to check that out, or think about doing that again.