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The next shot will be Google using Chrome to harvest sites users visit. Turning the readers themselves into the enemy.

Imagine things being so bad that you start paying for search (as I recently did (hi kagi.com)) Great thread - another area where things seem close to breaking apart.

I tried it a few times and it is better than Google, but I’d have to pay for Professional plan with unlimited searches in order to really ditch Google. I already pay for e-mail, maybe I’ll have to bite that bullet, too.

It was not a decision I came to easily - I can justify it as a work expense though. However the more I use it, the more I want to shift my whole family over to it. Still figuring out my relationship to Google Maps.

Completely aside from your great thread: the caption under the leading image of the article is hilarious

How did we get here? Things used to be mutualistic: search got free content and sites got free traffic. This was enforced by competition. Misbehaving site? De-index. Misbehaving search? Cut off crawler. But this only works if there are enough search engines that sites can afford to do it.

But as Google began capturing search, the pattern shifted. The more it monopolised search, the less it had to care about publishers. AI is only the most recent step in a trajectory that has been constant for almost twenty years. How did Google break competition in search?

The supracompetitive ad pricing point matches what we see in-channel: search CPCs keep climbing while organic clicks fall, so brands end up buying back traffic they used to earn. It's pushing a lot of teams toward newsletters and communities — the only channels left that Google can't tax.

The tool is defaults and its implementation is through a cartel mechanism. People don't change their search engine (often because they don't even see it as a separate product from browsers), especially if you make it hard. Being the default search in browsers and mobile OS means owning the market.