Google will stop working soon
Some of you sweet summer children may not know of a time before the internet. You can imagine everyone frolicking in meadows and playing VCR tapes on their black and white TVs, or whatever mental image makes you feel superior. That’s fine.
I’m slightly more fascinated by that liminal space of the early internet. Web 1.0. Sure, we can talk about modem noises and MySpace and so on, but specifically, I mean a time where there was internet, but no Google.
Yes, Yahoo search existed, but it was nowhere near as pervasive or reliable as current search engines. I can still clearly remember one of the first times I used the internet incorrectly. I tried to look up the website of a band I liked — I remembered the main part of the URL, but hadn’t noticed that it was .co.uk instead of .com. I typed in the url, got a 404…and that was it. The idea that I could look it up somewhere else didn’t occur to me. It was like going to a dictionary or encyclopedia, seeing that there was nothing between M and O, and just having to accept that there were no words beginning with N in existence.
Google took over the running of Yahoo search in June 2000 after being founded in 1998. By 2002 ‘to google’ was appearing in TV shows, so I think it’s safe to say the new era of the internet had arrived by then.
We have nearly 20 years experience of an internet where anything is searchable. Where, with the right terms and nous, anything can be theoretically unearthed. So much so that now, getting the computer to search for you is starting to replace basic folder structure.
This concept is so ingrained in our basic understanding of the net — the idea that once it’s out there it’s out there forever — that we might be shocked to realise things are disappearing. More to the point, I think we’re going to reach a situation where searching isn’t even possible in the way we think of it.
Like many schools, mine doesn’t exist any more. It was torn down around 20 years ago, with all of the kids being ferried off to one of the new academies in the area. As far as I can see, nothing has been done with the empty space either.
I don’t often think about my school. I moved away when I went to university and soon after my family moved. Most of the people I was close to either moved themselves, or lost contact. In short, I find myself forgetting about the place very often.
Last week, I was suddenly reminded of it. I can’t think why — perhaps someone posted a picture, or I stumbled across a news story from the area. I found myself on a facebook group for former students of the school, and looked back through the pictures to try and find things to bring back the memories.
There was a fair selection from the 60s, 70s and 80s. People had grown up and put their pictures on the group for all to see. I could look at the old images of the buildings and vaguely remember what they used to look like in my era. There were remarkably few from the 90s though. Perhaps it was just the particular group, perhaps people of my generation hadn’t bothered to upload the pictures quite as much, but those specific memories — pictures of the buildings, the teachers from that time, the flyers from school plays and sports days — were nowhere to be seen.
I know that these pictures exist online, because I’ve seen them before — a school reunion 15 years ago turned a lot of them up. I could systematically go through all of the pictures of everyone in my facebook friends I went to school with, but some of them aren’t on there any more, some have died, and it would clearly take me years.
I googled. Not much luck. My school does not have a list of famous alumni (one athlete and one c-list comedian from a nearly 60 year history). Other schools in the area which didn’t shut down have functioning websites with drone flyovers and alumni associations. Because mine closed down before the internet was quite as established as it is now, these kinds of semi-permanent memorials were never created. I think of it as similar to those lost Doctor Who episodes that were written over in the BBC vaults. It was there, but now it only exists in the memories and private collections of the people who were there.
Fine, you might think. There are countless old buildings that got knocked down that only exist in the history books. New stuff will be preserved much more efficiently!
Last week, I came across a reasonably funny Tiktok clip on Twitter. As is the way with Tiktok, it was of someone miming to a pre-existing clip, for some kind of humourous effect. It’s not this particular clip, but the voiceover is the same.
I began to scroll past, but had a sudden moment of curiosity. Where was that clip from? It sounded a little bit like one of the voices from Big Mouth, but I stopped watching that after season 1.
“No problem,” I thought “The dialogue is easy enough to transcribe — I’ll just google that!”
The dialogue in question, if you couldn’t be bothered to click the link above, is as follows:
“Listen, I can’t give any more information, but I fear I may have girlbossed a bit too close to the sun”
Googling the full quote brings me to a tumblr which uses it as a reference to a Gotham episode, and a Letterboxd review which seems to consist of the quote and only the quote. Just searching for “I fear I may have girlbossed a bit too close to the sun” brings me to a host of YouTube and Tiktok links of people lipsynching the original clip. TikTok also tells me that the original audio is ‘carol.ine.mp3’ — but searches for quote + carol and quote + caroline get me nowhere. Neither do searches for quote + Big Mouth, or quote + original. I can’t find anything other than generic ‘Girlboss’ references on Urban Dictionary or Know Your Meme. At this point, I’m starting to run out of ideas.
I do however get a TONNE of links to Redbubble, where enterprising* entrepreneurial** thinkers*** have made merch with the quote, which you can buy for a price.
I’m aware that by posting the above, I leave myself open to two immediate attacks:
- People laughingly at my ignorance and telling me where it’s from
- People pointing out that I’m now an old man who doesn’t understand technology.
I am 100% fine with the first of those. As long as you can tell me where it’s from, I’m OK with being mocked.
Equally, I’m kind of OK with the second one. I don’t use TikTok and I’m finewith that. I’d rather those younger than me have a space to themselves that doesn’t need me or anyone else taking it over, and it’s natural to point and laugh at the old man that doesn’t understand the kids’ new lingo, or whatever.
What worries me most, however, is that this isn’t the organic, inventive, creative approach that it’s being painted as. A few months ago I saw a hilarious short from Chelsea Hart. Not this one, but one quite similar to it. I then saw the same clip a few weeks later being lipsynced by someone else. I commented that people who were enjoying it should maybe follow the original creator. I was mocked, and told that I ‘did not understand TikTok’. Which, sure, fine — but this now seems to be the route we’re going down.
The original audio from that TikTok was labelled ‘Quote — Chelsea Hart’. Great — I’m perfectly fine with people reusing and building upon existing work to create new things. I’m a huge fan of sampling within music, whether done creatively or not, but if you ARE going to whack a giant, unedited vocal sample in the middle of your tune, you give credit. Even if it’s just a little note in the co-writers section, you find some way for people who liked the work you built upon to find their way back to the original if they choose. Not everyone has to — you can enjoy listening to Straight Outta Compton without having to listen to Amen Brother first, but if you want to, you can search and find out where that drum sample came from.
My concern is that this removal of connections — this adding layers and layers on top of things without any link to the foundations — is simply going to cause problems for creators down the line, and for society as a whole later on. Google’s dominance of online search and the associated advertising isn’t a good thing, but we’ve all come to expect that things can be found somehow. The existence of a new Ghostbusters film doesn’t mean that the previous films cease to exist.
But what if it did? What if, every time you put ‘Ghostbusters’ into your search box, wherever you put it, you could only find the newest version? Would you try to find an old VHS tape or DVD? How? Would you type ‘Ghostbusters’ into eBay or Amazon? And if those could only bring up the remake? What then?
I’m wary of getting a bit ‘old man yells at cloud’ again here. My issue is not with TikTok per se, or with the inevitable loss of my youth.
What concerns me is that the joy of the internet was supposed to be in making information accessible to everyone. My previous story linked above was concerned with people losing knowledge — losing the ability to do things because they were so used to computers doing what they asked, they never bothered to learn any further. What scares me — and this is all wrapped up in ideas about the coming Metaverse and the continued existence of NFTs — is that we’re starting to reintroduce boundaries that people had forgotten about.
For me, some of the most useful elements of the internet — early P2P networks, Wikipedia, Social Media, WhoSampled, Urban Dictionary and so on — all exist because people put in unpaid time to make them great. Through that effort, information is now available to us all (for better or worse) that wouldn’t have been previously.
There is information out there now which is almost impossible to find — not because it doesn’t exist, but because the sheer quantity of information buries it like a needle in a needle-stack.
James Vincent posted a thread this week on much the same subject, arguing that websites are now being filled with AI-generated SEO-farming redirections. I don’t agree with all of his findings — I don’t think the AI text is imaginative or funny, for example — but the idea that the internet is being filled with nonsense designed to grab your attention without providing the thing you were actually looking for is fairly clear.
I’m concerned that the day will come where yet again, only the rich and powerful will have access to the information that we all take for granted. I’m also concerned that that day has already passed. Perhaps, in future, when people discuss Search Engine Optimisation, we might consider who and what it’s being optimised for.
* — dickheads
** — dickheads
*** — dickheads
