The article that inspired the previous post:

When it comes to the company’s core search engine, however, the image of progress looks far muddier. Like its much-smaller rivals, Google’s idea for the future of search is to deliver ever more answers within its walled garden, collapsing projects that would once have required a host of visits to individual web pages into a single answer delivered within Google itself.

The company’s AI-powered search results, which it calls Search Generative Experience, are coming to all users in the United States soon, Google announced today. By the end of 2024, they will appear at the top of results for 1 billion users.

As I noted when I wrote about the new, more extractive search engines from companies like Arc and Brave, Google’s move to answer more questions on the search engine results page is simply a continuation of a long-standing practice. But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someday plan an entire anniversary dinner, or cross-country-move, or trip abroad. A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models.

This new approach is captured elegantly in a slogan that appeared several times during Tuesday’s keynote: let Google do the Googling for you. It’s a phrase that identifies browsing the web — a task once considered entertaining enough that it was given the nickname “surfing” — as a chore, something better left to a bot.

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When I started covering Google a decade ago, the company talked often about evolving search until it resembled the computer from Star Trek: an omnipresent, omniscient digital assistant. The Star Trek computer is notable for its ability to answer questions more or less instantly, and if the information it provides is supplied by something akin to the world wide web, it is not something that its users ever see. Whatever labor funded the production of knowledge that it refers to goes unmentioned, and whatever sources it relies on go uncredited.

It is this vision of the future that Tuesday’s announcements moves us ever closer to. And it is one that is understandably of concern to the many people who have come to rely on Google answering questions imperfectly, or partially, and funneling traffic to them since 1998.

“Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers,” read an accurate headline in the Washington Post on Monday. Until now, publishers have been able to rely on significant volumes of traffic coming from the blue links that appear under many queries. But what the company is now calling AI overviews often obscure these links, requiring users to click to see them, or simply abstracting them away in an automatically generated summary. Analysts who have studied the company’s early experiments with SGE say a bloodbath is coming.

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Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.