Google is so entwined with the web that they've changed how people interact with and publish content.
Deep browsing sessions through layers of hyperlinks are dead. Instead people jump into and out of pages from Google, Twitter or HN. Personal home pages are dead, instead you need to publish to a platform like Medium or Twitter which will promote your content for you because no one is browsing anymore.
Now we have a world where the web pages primarily about companies (not individuals) create pages for Google (not people) as a way of juicing the search rankings so they can then get people in to download their mobile app.
In a nostalgic way, I miss the old web. But in a more pragmatic way I'm appalled at how inefficient this system is. If you wanted to design a way to index the world's information from the ground up, using toil and SEO spend as a proxy for quality and legitimacy (i.e. a million keyword heavy custom landing pages and bought backlinks) is a terrible way to do it.
Deep browsing sessions through layers of hyperlinks are dead. Instead people jump into and out of pages from Google, Twitter or HN. Personal home pages are dead, instead you need to publish to a platform like Medium or Twitter which will promote your content for you because no one is browsing anymore.
Now we have a world where the web pages primarily about companies (not individuals) create pages for Google (not people) as a way of juicing the search rankings so they can then get people in to download their mobile app.
In a nostalgic way, I miss the old web. But in a more pragmatic way I'm appalled at how inefficient this system is. If you wanted to design a way to index the world's information from the ground up, using toil and SEO spend as a proxy for quality and legitimacy (i.e. a million keyword heavy custom landing pages and bought backlinks) is a terrible way to do it.