> “Ten blue links” · I remember the dismissive phase well: Ten blue links was boring, it was the past, it was not what people wanted. They want answers to their questions, complete and correct, so much more wholesome than an abbreviated sampling of the General Internet Uproar. And that was partly right: When I type in “-12C in F” or “population of vietnam” I just want a number.
> But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.
Ten blue links are great on desktop, not so great on mobile, where websites take longer to load and the cookie banner takes up half the page. There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile.
Search engines should work completely different on desktop and mobile. Give me ten blue links on desktop, give me an AI generated answer on mobile. This might be true for other websites as well. Maybe responsive design was a mistake.
Reading is a skill. The more you read, the better you get. The laptop encourages you to surf (and surfing is reading), the phone encourages you to scroll, usually through images and videos.
Attention span is a separate issue. I lack the attention span to watch a short youtube video, but I can easily read long essays.
> But those Ten Blue Links surfaced by the PageRank-that-was had a special magic. I found them intensely human, a reflection of the voices populating what remains of the Web, the only platform without a vendor. This was true when I was there and I said so, but was laughed at.
Ten blue links are great on desktop, not so great on mobile, where websites take longer to load and the cookie banner takes up half the page. There's a reason that kids use TikTok as search engine on mobile.
Search engines should work completely different on desktop and mobile. Give me ten blue links on desktop, give me an AI generated answer on mobile. This might be true for other websites as well. Maybe responsive design was a mistake.