Is Google taking us back to the bad old 90s with its new Discover model?

An article in Search Engine Land, “Google.com mobile home page no longer just a search box, now shows Google Discover feed”, reminded me of a topic I had been thinking about for a while, but had not yet written about: Google’s new look when we search on mobile devices.

For some time now, the Google app on mobile devices has stopped being a blank page with the company logo, a search box and two gray buttons, and has turned into a mash up of information and news supposedly based on our interests: Google Discover is based on information generated by our activity on the web and different apps, our devices’ characteristics, search history, location history and more.

The idea echoes the philosophy of the portals of the 1990s, that users typically configured by default in their browsers and where we could find anything from news headlines to the weather, email, and all kinds of other information, including, of course, advertising. The idea was to be the first thing users found when using the internet and to try to keep them occupied for as long as possible. That allowed the portal to display more advertising, which in turn became more and more segmented as we revealed more and more specific information about our interests.

When Google appeared on the scene, what attracted most attention, apart from the superiority of its search results, was its empty-looking page, which loaded instantly and provided immediate access to results from which we could find what we were looking for, without further distractions. When, several years later, the company decided to base its business model on advertising, it still did so relatively discreetly, placing ads to the right of the results, suggesting they were a counterpart rather than a distraction, without images and very much in line with its minimalist aesthetics.

I can accept that the same rules don’t necessarily apply to the smartphone, but moving from a minimalist look to a page bulging with news, highlights of your favorite team’s games, the weather or a huge tailor-made box full of information of all kinds is not about providing a better service: it’s a philosophical volte face. Fortunately, Google’s new look can be eliminated simply by going to the settings, then Discover and then “Don’t show on homepage”. Within the Google app, similarly you can select Settings and then Discover and then choose to Turn off Discover. That said, as we all know, most of us won’t bother and instead will go along with whatever Google puts in front of us…

On a more serious note, what does this philosophical shift mean? I open a browser because I want to do something in particular. When I open a tab on my computer, all I want to see is a blank window with 10 unobtrusive icons for the pages I access most commonly: end of story. I open my tab, I type in the address or my search request and off I go, and this is an approach I would like to repeat on my smartphone, along the lines of “browser equals the means to direct me to a certain page”. I’m sorry, but I find Google’s new philosophy of, “browser equals mash up of news, entertainment and content” annoying: if you fail to deactivate it, you can find yourself forgetting what you were looking for in the browser in the first place, why you opened it, or dithering about where to go next, as happens with YouTube. This all might be an interesting experiment for Google, but you have to wonder why they have revived an approach they killed almost two decades ago. Perhaps the folks at Mountain View have caught on (too late) to the Facebook thing of, “I’ll just have a look at what my friends are sharing”?

I would go further: accepting “this news might interest you” versus “I’ll decide what interests me, thank you very much” could be what underlies many of the problems with fake news: in other words, a more passive, consumerist attitude that can lead to “it must be true, because I saw it on Google”. How many people do we know who think that Google is synonymous with the internet, who do not bother to use the address bar, and that if the Google logo doesn’t appear when opening a new tab, think their computer has broken down? It seems to me that this could be a useful way to spread false news. Call me old-fashioned, but I want my browser to be a navigator, not a mish mash of news and gossip.

Sure, Google allows us to deactivate Discover, but activating it by default reveals an idea of what the mobile web should be that frankly, I find worrying. Of course, Google is not alone: fortunately, we don’t see too many invitations to set pages as default, harking back to the 90s, and it tends to be the gullible among us who accept the offer and have no idea how to unset it.

Refind is one of the sites I now use the most and that appears first in my home tab, includes, in addition to its very useful content storage tools and recommendations, a feature to add Refind to Chrome, configuring each new tab as a summary of news that might interest me, that taking into account its algorithms, are probably well chosen. I don’t necessarily have a problem with the type of content that appears on my home page, but I don’t need one that distracts me from what I set out to do. As a result, despite using Refind on a day-to-day basis to manage news or even to return to it for inspiration when I finish my reading through Feedly and have not found anything to write about, I have made the conscious decision not to install it as a default: I don’t need the distraction, thanks. Or is it just me?

I am concerned by Google’s decision to digitally distract us. Maybe it’s a sign of the times, and maybe I’m old-fashioned: it seems the internet is no longer a place to look for something in particular, but a place to go to entertain yourself, and so logically invites distractions.

We seem to have moved away from the internet as a powerful tool that can do anything toward mass entertainment: instead of “ask me and I will answer” it’s now about, “you don’t need to ask; leave it to me.” I find it worrying that having killed off the portal model, and facing no competition, Google now seems to be using the smartphone to set itself up as the internet’s only portal.

(En espa?ol, aquí)