I grew up using the internet as a child and when Google came out it was way more a blessing than a parasite.
The web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall.
Once google became the Internet's frontend everything was one or two hops away. It was awesome, and I think that it has evolved in a way that saves time with the snippets and knowledge graph panel at the expense of taking away clicks from sites that needed to serve their ads. Although today things are getting worse with walled gardens and SEO.
A problem that the internet has not solved yet is how to keep webpages up while there's increasingly more content. Most sites were maintained at a loss by people, or leeching resources at a university or company. The closest "people" have got to fix this IMO is through P2P, but it got too focused on piracy and got a bad reputation with malware too. And I think we never had the infrastructure to serve and share webpages we visited. Sharing today is still a mess and we still depend on centralized distribution + caching (and that's dying with https, only big companies who are better off giving caching servers away to ISPs can do this).
Ads came to "save" the internet from this problem. I really hate them and I wish we had a better model, but they seem a necessary evil as people just got used to believe that all digital things are free when they obviously cost something, and that still shows today in the apps stores.
The web was hard to navigate and you relied on webpages "befriending" each other and helping you navigate to similar pages. That was real navigation and it had terrible recall. Once google became the Internet's frontend everything was one or two hops away. It was awesome, and I think that it has evolved in a way that saves time with the snippets and knowledge graph panel at the expense of taking away clicks from sites that needed to serve their ads. Although today things are getting worse with walled gardens and SEO.
A problem that the internet has not solved yet is how to keep webpages up while there's increasingly more content. Most sites were maintained at a loss by people, or leeching resources at a university or company. The closest "people" have got to fix this IMO is through P2P, but it got too focused on piracy and got a bad reputation with malware too. And I think we never had the infrastructure to serve and share webpages we visited. Sharing today is still a mess and we still depend on centralized distribution + caching (and that's dying with https, only big companies who are better off giving caching servers away to ISPs can do this).
Ads came to "save" the internet from this problem. I really hate them and I wish we had a better model, but they seem a necessary evil as people just got used to believe that all digital things are free when they obviously cost something, and that still shows today in the apps stores.