Call off the search

摘要

In the beginning, web search sucked. Stacks of spam, flashing banner ads, results nobody asked for. So when, like the cosmogonic deities of lore, mighty Googlers burst forth from the digital heavens to weave order out of chaos, the web rejoiced. Lo, the white space; behold, the quality-based rankings. Then these gods, capricious that they were, took it all away. Welcome to the new-age dark age. In 2017, my thumbs bleed from scrolling through the ads, the YouTube videos, the "related" searches, and all the other random crap Google crams above the actual results because it's just so damn confident in its creepy monitoring of my daily existence that it thinks it knows what I want better than I do. You know what I don't want? A dump of news articles, links to Wikipedia, and song lyrics. Also, have you ever tried looking for something that happened a few years ago? Hahaha. In Google years that's antediluvian history. (Unless it's the one article about your light brush with the law that some hyperlocal rag published in the early aughts-somehow that shoots straight to the top.) My favorite, though, is when Google presumes to just flat-out ignore certain search terms, striking through the keyest of keywords. I TYPED THEM FOR A REASON. And it's only getting worse. Earlier this year the company experimented with autoplay videos in search, harvesting even more of our ever-scarcer attention cycles. Search is dead. No, it's undead. Search is a zombie, and it's feeding on our brains.