Manuel “Manu” Moreale: The Web != the Web via Curtis McHale

when tech reporters say “the web” they don’t mean the web. When these people talk about the web they’re talking about the web they’re part of: they talk about the web that is powered by advertising and by tracking, the web that needs traffic to sustain itself. The commercial web is what they talk about.

Manuel goes on to express the wonderful internet that exists outside of social media, ad tech, and predates search engines like Google, which they confidently state will easily survive all the AI summaries Google can throw at people. I largely agree!

What’s interesting about this post is that its criticism is directed at tech reporters, but I think it could just as easily be directed at the most ardent AI critic as well. This is the exact argument I hear from them as a major reason LLMs ought not be integrated into search engines.

I’d add that an enormous amount of the people who find these delightful corners of the internet often do so from search engines like Google. Literally 2 hours ago I was looking into updating the icons I’m using in a project, and Google was really freaking helpful in finding good options. What would I have done without a search engine? Guess at URLs to find a community of designers talking about icons? Would I ask on social media, therefore scaling the quality and quantity of results with my social status? Maybe the answer is just that something massively popular and broad like Reddit would still be around and I’d search there, although that’s squarely part of the “corporate web” as well, so maybe not?

As I wrote about in a recent members post, I do think there will be significant impact to search engines starting to send less traffic to the rest of the web, but I also don’t think it’s a knockout blow. I just think we are quick to discount the value that products like Google bring to the indie web and we’d really feel it if it truly went away.