Google Is Desperate For Us To Forget The Simple Joy Of The Original...

Until I found the website ooh.directory last year, I hadn't really understood, completely, how malnourished my internet diet had become. I still had some bookmarks I visited everyday, and the social media feed I checked (too often) for breaking news and interesting stories. But only when I made a conscious effort for the first time in a decade to fill up an RSS reader with bloggers, critics, news sources, and even webcomics did I realize that I'd lost track of the original, primal joy of the internet:

Clicking a link and finding a whole new world unfurl before me, as fast as my dial-up modem or DSL connection could load it in.

I suppose I started taking this experience for granted at some point; once we all came to understand the internet as an infinite repository for knowledge, the obvious goal became accessing that knowledge more efficiently. It's not that I ever really stopped clicking on links. I just stopped putting in the work of looking for websites through directory listings, like the ones I used to love browsing on Yahoo.com for hours at a time (Home > Recreation > Games > Video Games > Emulation, anyone?).

I realize in hindsight that that was the really magical part, not knowing what I would get when I clicked. Finding a site wholly born from the passion and personality of someone I'd never met was as much the point as the information that site contained.

For 20 years Google has been trying to kill this version of the internet that I loved. At first I think it was with good intentions: the internet just seemed so vast back then (ha!) that a search engine that could truly crawl all of it to surface the "best" stuff was amazing. Then, of course, Google took over the entirety of internet advertising and tightly integrated it with search. It took over browsing with Chrome so it could control the standards websites would have to adhere to. It made it so you could search without even going to Google.com.

Google itself has become the final form of "Saved you a click,"

It started autofilling what everyone else was searching for, so that it could precisely tailor those results pages (and all the lucrative sponsored links at the top—$198 billion in ad revenue last year!). For years now we've watched Google rip more and more information out of the websites it once presented as promising, useful links and act as though it's done us a huge favor.

Why should you click on George Clooney's Wikipedia page (the first result when you search his name) when a

Source: PC Gamer