We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful.
Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.
I know this is likely to do with the nature of the problem, but that hasn’t stopped us from getting some wildly-unsuitable decentralised nonsense in the past.
It is hard to replace the old thing with another old thing. Search engine is already a fine tuned business, new comers will have hard time in it, no matter their tech stack.
It's like trying to raise better horses, while the other side has already built a empire on that and weaponized it.
The way out of here is to find something better than search engine, just like how cars replaced horses. But it's the same reason Google Search is replacing itself with AI too, they're already trying to replace their horses with cars.
On a higher level than individual URLs and separate from browser favorites. Something like versioned packages of links with decorations.
Something like a ".urlpackage" format that will have
- a list of urls
- optional metadata for each url, such as image, description, last-known-good
- metadata for the entire package, including version, an image, a favicon, and a description for the entire package that a client could use to present it nicely to the end user.
It'd be cool if my phone could open this format, show me the image and description with the list of links, and let me browse them, add them to my bookmarks, or add to the collection and make a new .urlpackage that I could then share back or publish somewhere.
It's probably possible to simply do this with a self-contained HTML file or similar I guess, though.
Does a move like this give more power / value to websites like reddit? A link aggregator that is organized is much more useful for finding new websites.
Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation.
Anyone miss StumbleUpon?