Not a ghost.

Good riddance to the old web

Nobody likes searching. They like knowing. The old web confused the two.

Say you want to learn about chickadees. Wikipedia is great for that—here's the chickadee page, full of solid facts. But what if you have a question Wikipedia can't answer, like "I found an injured chickadee—what do I do?"

Here's what Google gives you:

The information is there, technically. But it takes 20 minutes to sift through paywalls, content farms, forum posts from 2006, a site about raising chickens (wrong bird), and articles about baby birds (yours is an adult). Most of it is generic, outdated, or irrelevant. And nearly all of it ends the same way: "call a wildlife rehabilitator." It's 9pm on a Sunday. No one's answering.

I won't bore you with the full AI response. But it answers the damn question, which is all anyone wants. Step by step, specific to small songbirds, actionable right now. Then it cites its sources: Ontario Nature, Best Friends Animal Society, Greencross Vets, DFW Wildlife Hotline.

The old web made us confuse the process of searching with the goal of knowing. We got very good at opening tabs, skimming content farms, triangulating between forum posts from 2006 and SEO-optimized listicles. We learned to parse the results, not to trust them. It sucked. Good riddance.

(See also: Stack Overflow. It’s a place to ask questions from developers about code. It had a reputation for being helpful, but also a bit snarky and hard to get an answer to a question. Since chatGPT came out, Stack Overflow’s traffic has fallen off a cliff. Why? Because asking an AI is better than asking snarky developers. Again, good riddance.)