As someone who has grown up watching Card Catalogs lose to electronic search, Internet Directories lose to electronic search, photo albums lose to electronic search, Curated Network Televisions lose out to ellectronic search, large-scale advertising lose out to electronic search…
I don’t know. But whatever it is, 20 years from now, we’d say “Why didn’t you have a search engine that could do that for you?”
Card Catalogs were these index-cards we kept in a cabinet that helped people look for a book. And don’t say “word of mouth”, because card catalogs didn’t help with that. Card Catalogs helped you go from “Author or Subject” to “Book”, so you were literally trying to figure out a book you already “had an idea” about.
Tell me, how do you look for new books today? Do you use Amazon’s search engine? Google’s search engine?
Internet Directories were these lists of webpages that we used to organize. It was before webrings. The gist is that an internet directory is a list of cool websites on a certain subject, and we can keep those lists organized. Alas, no one used them after good search engines were made.
Curated TV Networks are losing out to Netflix, Youtube, and TikTok. All of which are search-engine based media consumption technologies. All hail the algorithm.
Now tell me where “search” is actually losing in our society. Maybe Google isn’t as dominant as it once was, but Netflix is still a damn search bar.
Maybe TikTok is finally something different: you don’t even search anymore. The algorithm assumes it knows what videos you like and shoves the next video into your face.