Yes, I've been quiet with my sites recently. As I noted in the Spring, I'm working on revisiting site design and information. It continues to be a work in progress, as the tool I'm using isn't really ready for prime time production yet (Real Soon Now).
However, along the way in rethinking my Web presence and diddling with prototype designs, new concepts, and more, I discovered something: The Internet as you knew it is dead.
You may have heard the term SEO before. That stands for Search Engine Optimization, something pretty much every site owner and maintainer has been dealing with for decades now.
SEO is really a euphemism for "get Google's attention." With 90% of the search market these days (and a majority pretty much since inception), whatever Google wants Web sites to do has had to be paid attention to. At the onset, Google used "experts" to tag sites that should be prioritized in search results, but humans are expensive and Google has lots of computers, so the method of prioritizing sites quickly gave way to algorithms.
Worse still, as Google's revenue became more reliant upon selling ads, the old search mechanisms started breaking in favor of what made Google more money. Try this as an illustration: type "Kodak Porta" into a Google search bar. Did that bring up the company that actually makes that film or better yet point you to the data sheet for Porta? Nope. Instead, today I get this stack of things (in this order):
- five sponsored ads
- Amazon!
- An AI QA
- Wikipedia page
- An fstoppers.com review (good on you and your SEO, fstoppers)
- eight "popular products" (more ads)
- more of the above
Nowhere on this first page of search results is the producer of the product, who might actually have the best answer to your question(s). Of course, if all you wanted to do is buy some Porta, well, your results were sold to the highest bidders.
This is no longer useful search, and it's getting worse. Even DuckDuckGo has a similar problem with the search term I just suggested, though they at least claim that they protect your private information. In April, the US District Court held that Google violated antitrust law, specifically because the Google search methodology has been abused. What will happen from that decision is still unknown, but I don't think it makes a lot of difference.
Follow the money. Always follow the money. The reason why Google wants you to use an Android device, the Chrome browser, and their Search engine is simple: that gives them full control over you, and they can track and promote to their heart's content. But you might have noticed that third thing in the stack of things I got from a Google search: an AI response. And this leads me to my original bold-faced assertion, above: in the coming year or two, search as we know it will disappear and be replaced by AI interaction.
This introduces all kinds of interesting topics, including where did AI get its information from? My site currently blocks some of the AI engines from scraping it, but that quickly became a futile game as the only one that seems to respect .HTACCESS file restrictions is ChatGTP. I blocked another AI engine—you might guess which one—only to find that it simply resorted to accessing the site using a different server.
I'm writing the above because what's happening is going to broadly impact your use of the Internet soon, if it hasn't already, and what you're reading right now is an Internet site. Search no longer points to "reliable data sources." AI engines are pattern matching, not knowledge bases, so hallucinate answers that are incorrect, misleading, or use poor language. I recently responded to someone's "is this AI summary correct" query with a pretty scathing breakdown of all the things that were wrong with what AI had written. Sloppy wording, loose language, incorrect assertions, inconsistent information, and more. Remember, most so-called AI engines are really just pattern matchers. They use a huge collection of previously posted information to form their response, and create that response in similar patterns. If someone with a much scraped Web site once wrote "diffraction is ignorable," then guess what answer you might get in the future?
I've tried—to the best of my ability, as I'm the only one populating my sites, books, articles, and presentations—to provide useful, detailed, accurate, and helpful information, and I've been doing that on the Internet for over 30 years (yes, 30+). My project this summer was to try to figure out how to do that better, and redesign my sites for the future Internet I can foresee.
But Google, Meta, Microsoft and others want a future whereby they scape all information from others, then are the sole ones presenting it. That is dangerous in more ways than you might first imagine. You might have noticed more and more of the best information providers moving behind paywalls. I'm bemused to find that there's an Ayn Rand irony happening here. One of her assertions was that the uncompromising free-market capitalists were fighting against so called "second handers" who attempt to live through others. This all became the primary theme in her novel Atlas Shrugged, where the creators, inventors, and scientists all retreated from the second-handers. Hmm, Google has become quite the second-hander, hasn't it?
Why did I write "irony" in the previous paragraph? Because the current administration and large corporations may say they're following or approve of Rand's ideas and are free market believers, but they don't seem to realize that they've become the ones Rand was railing against. While I don't really agree with Rand's ideas—she oversimplifies and ignores a great deal—it appears I'm now talking much like her heroes do, thus another irony ;~).
As I've noted before, I'm at a point in my life where I don't need to do this anymore. However, I enjoy what essentially is a new form of teaching.
All the above has got me rethinking and recalibrating, though. I'm not interested in helping Google serve you while they extract a constant toll (disclosure: I own some Google stock, both directly and in ETFs). Which may mean that I need to put my best and most timely information behind a paywall. What I'm now exploring in my summer Web redesign are ways of doing that while still leaving exposed a large amount of useful, detailed, accurate, and helpful information. There are plenty of others who've shown that this can be done. For instance, MacMost, a site you Mac users should be aware of.
So if you got this far, don't expect major site refreshes as I emerge from my summer pontifications. I'll continue to do what I've been doing for a while before eventually deploying byThom 4.0. And I won't deploy at all unless I can guarantee that what I'm going to do is better than what has come before.
___________________
Is there a photographic implication in the above? Sure is. At the simplest level: you should reinvent and experiment rather than blatantly copy. I've written before that photography tends to be faddish, with some in-the-moment trend becoming how everyone composes and processes until that eventually becomes blasé and the drum majors up front start down a different path. But if you want to really stand out, you need to explore your own path and ignore what everyone else is doing.
