Who is the internet for?

I’ve been thinking along these same lines recently. Chris Butler put it well in a recent article:

People lived [in the internet] once, then AI moved in. But we’re still building a house for people. I think we might be building the wrong thing.

He goes on to talk about old-school SEO and how that forced people to craft their content to fit the whims of machines. We provided meta data, titles of a certain length crammed with keywords (but not too crammed), and unique descriptions with content full of more keywords. All of this so the machines could find it, categorize it, organize it, and remember it when someone searched with similar keywords.

Even their search queries were influenced by how we were taught to search via the machines. We strung together keywords like a robot, neglecting articles and prepositions and all the things that make speech/writing seem natural. We don’t have to do any of that now.

And that should be great. But it also means all the ways in which we taught ourselves the language of machines are no longer relevant. We can search with natural language, more like we were asking a friend a question. But for those that make their living providing content and keywords and meta data to the machines, they need to adapt to a whole new set of patterns we have not identified yet.

But the author goes on to say, what is the point of search anymore? Getting into Google’s index does not guarantee traffic to your site. Content gets sucked up and spit out to those that request it with the smallest, easiest to ignore citation footnote. If search won’t provide the source traffic, why finagle your content to fit the search engines?

General knowledge will not be enough anymore. The Machine knows all of the tried and true answers (and lots of not so true answers, too). To be human on the web means to express your point of view and experiences — something that can not be found in the Machines. Let’s hope some other humans can find it.