Remember what search on the internet was like before search engine optimization (SEO)? Neither do I. I remember looking for web pages with the Yahoo! Directory, which was essentially a user-curated list of sites taxonomized by subject. I remember using AOL keywords, which took you directly to a given URL from its browser. And I know that search must have existed, because why wouldn’t it?
But for the life of me, I cannot remember what things were like before Google destroyed them. SEO was an ever-evolving set of tactics one could use to game Google’s search algorithm and send your content to the top of results, which was why there was a solid five years when a page titled SEXY HAMLET FAST CASH HAMLET NAKED HAMLET NEWS was always guaranteed to be the first thing you saw after searching for “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”
Google sort of solved that problem, but only with editorial intervention that defeated the promise of a free and open internet. Today if you Google “Hamlet” you will get Wikipedia’s page first, and then some AI generated foolishness that ends up being useless or misleading half the time, then possibly some sponsored search results inviting you to memorize Hamlet in 30 seconds with the new app everyone is talking about, and then, sandwiched above several trillion SEXY HAMLET results, a few actually legitimate links.
None of this is ever going away, of course. Not even after today, now that a federal court has decided that Google is a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Act. Liberals may be throwing Judge Amit Mehta a victory parade, and the government may very well decide that Google needs to be broken up, but the Enshittified Search Business Model it trailblazed will almost certainly be around well after the sun has burned itself out.
Instead a critique of antitrust capitalism based on predicting the future, however, I’d like to ask a different question: what is antitrust going to do about the last fifteen years?
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