The web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall. Once google became the Internet's frontend everything was one or two hops away. It was awesome, and I think that it has evolved in a way that saves time with the snippets and knowledge graph panel at the expense of taking away clicks from sites that needed to serve their ads. Although today things are getting worse with walled gardens and SEO.
A problem that the internet has not solved yet is how to keep webpages up while there's increasingly more content. Most sites were maintained at a loss by people, or leeching resources at a university or company. The closest "people" have got to fix this IMO is through P2P, but it got too focused on piracy and got a bad reputation with malware too. And I think we never had the infrastructure to serve and share webpages we visited. Sharing today is still a mess and we still depend on centralized distribution + caching (and that's dying with https, only big companies who are better off giving caching servers away to ISPs can do this).
Ads came to "save" the internet from this problem. I really hate them and I wish we had a better model, but they seem a necessary evil as people just got used to believe that all digital things are free when they obviously cost something, and that still shows today in the apps stores.
Advertising worked just fine for more than a century, ever since the invention of consumerist society. (How much of that is really necessary in a society that is pushing headlong into unsustainability is another, bigger story.)
The disaster we have now in our hands is of a more immediate and crass nature.
Think about it: there are algorithmic breakthroughs that can help everybody on the planet raise their level of information retrieval and the only discussion is which of the former or the current consumer tech oligopolies will use it best to push ads and how to double down on a bad design.
Don't tell me you forgot Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Lycos, and all those other search engines existed! Lycos also had hotbot and tripod.com, back when homepages were your internet presence instead of social media.
Maybe Google had results that were a bit more relevant and won that competition, but they didn't Change Everything.
It's as if you brought up the first Motorola phone or blackberry and compared it to the iPhone saying it was just ok.
>the web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall.
This is exactly why internet was decentralized. A network of social connections between small online spaces people congregated in was essential to find what you wanted. It was somewhat of a replication of the old world - where in order to find an answer, you first had to get into relevant circles (eg. a local club, university, etc). You didn't just get an answer to your question, you inevitably had to sift through a lot of other content and learn about new places.
Google cut through all of that. Ideally, you could just get the answer you wanted, and not even see the rest of the site. The first order effect was that everyone's life get better. The second order effect is that it killed the old decentralized web, because random discovery nearly died down.
LLM are only the next step on this, but I don't think they change much. I think it's mostly going to damage reddit. A lot of reddit questions are an attempt to find an answer to something that google is too dumb to find - but llms may be able to.
The defense to this - are chatrooms, like discord. Sometimes I see people complaining that so much information is now 'hidden' on discord. But that's the exact point. Making information hard to get means people are forced to interact with each other. This creates incentives to contribute.
That's the future. Chatrooms may be replaced by voice based vr, hard to say. We already passed the peak of public information dissemination, and are going back to old style "ask at the university", just more decentralized and online.
Who do you think it would have been competitive for?
The GPT LLMs just raise the bar for information retrieval. And so it goes.