André Staltz - Google shattered human connection

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2025-01-19 00:00:09

People who have used the web since the 90s generally miss those times, because they were calmer, they were cooler (in terms of homepage creativity), and less weaponized and polarized. The web has changed a lot in the past two decades, and the biggest advances were the advent of search engines and social media.

One of these in particular, Google’s search engine, is typically criticized for their centralization, hoarding of user metadata, and more recently with a decay in search result quality. In this article I’m not going to talk about any of those. This morning while drinking my coffee, I noticed a critical way in which Google has hurt the web and society in general. In fact, this criticism extends to all search engines, including the one I use, DuckDuckGo. But since Google is still the dominant one, this article is focused on them.

To start with my main point: Google popularized the habit of taking things out of context. Google allowed users to cut several steps in their discovery journey, creating a more direct sense of “information at your fingertips”, which was a common mantra at the time (thank you, Bill Gates, twice). This is not new information, we’ve always known that Google made information retrieval easier. The problem is that making something easy has a dark side, because whatever was hard to do is not going to be done at all anymore. In specific, Google eliminated the need to connect with communities online if all you wanted was the knowledge produced by that community. And connecting with people and communities – in the style we still practiced in the 90s – is time consuming, often hard.