Word of mouth in the age of the ad-driven internet
OtherOpinion
Sara Gerretsen
12/28/2025 9:00 AMIf you're my age or older, you probably knew the era where google was actual magic. No matter what you wanted to find, it was there at your fingertips. No matter how specialised or generic, you could find it, if not in one search, then definitely in two. But none of that exists any more. Profit incentives pulled the search engine owners' interests and those of the engine's users apart. Two searches make more money than one. And the advertising model is showing cracks big enough to spook the industry to the next false promise of infinite growth. Now the users of search engines are left with half-functioning and intentionally dysfunctional products. With very little sign it'll improve soon. A problem analysis What does a search engine give the user. Answers to questions yes, but more importantly, a way to discover the internet. The Pre-AI Problem A simple thought experiment, how would you browse the internet without a search engine? What if google, bing, yahoo, kagi, searx and all the meta-search engines, all disappeared. Right now. How would you get around? How many URLs do you know from memory? Are your bookmarks enough to enable most of your browsing? There will be people for whom the internet is perfectly usable in this configuration, I was personally able to last roughly a month using the internet exactly like this. But it is difficult, for most people it'd mean completely rethinking the way they approach the internet. And regardless of what you would still be able to acce ...