Once upon a time in the mists of the distant past, if you knew a web site’s numeric Internet protocol address, you could access the site. That was it. A bit later a tool was developed which indexed and archived File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. It was called “archie” (for archive). A little while later a more complex method of indexing and archiving web addresses was developed called “veronica”. Those were the distant ancestors of Google and other search engines.
As Google and then Microsoft’s Bing gained dominance in archiving and searching the Internet, a new specialized skill evolved called “search engine optimization” (SEO). That means just what it says—optimizing the contents and construction of a web site to encourage search engines to find and, presumably, navigate to your web site when users performed appropriate searches. It’s an ever-evolving skill since the strategy, rules, and priority that search engines use to produce and display their results are always changing.
Yesterday it occurred to me that SEO has entered a new phase. Today it must also mean strategies that encourage users to “click through” from search engine results to your site rather than merely review the summaries and excerpts of the contents produced by the artificial intelligence of search engines.
I suspect that Google and Microsoft and other search engines which, rather than their traditional activities of identifying, archiving, and listing web sites are summarizing them, are exposing themselves to a titanic class action suit. I have always thought that the business models of Google, etc. were iffy. They make money by acquiring and using information which does not belong to them. But there was always a sort of fair exchange involved: users produce content, Google analyzes the content and directs traffic to the users’ web sites. What happens when Google stops directing traffic to web sites?
Why even have a public web site? Under those circumstances wouldn’t it make more sense to make use of specialized aggregators like Amazon.com, Facebook, and to some extent Substack?
