The death of discovery

This is the first in a two-part series. I had to break this up because I wanted to explain why/how things have gotten to our current point, and then offer how I’ve been managing the issue myself. We don’t want to get lost in the Haterade! So the “living well” portion is saved for Part 2.

One of the first research reports I wrote in middle school was on Pittsburgh’s great, old amusement park, Kennywood. The idea came to me in large part because there happened to be a book at our school library on the park’s history.

My sweet, young lambs: This was how research and discovery once worked. You ran across materials about a thing and realized that you had yourself a primary source. Exciting! A whole book/article/documentary dedicated to a thing. Then you would find some secondary sources that related to, but were perhaps not directly focused on, your topic. You would have to get a little creative and problem solve: Maybe you were looking for a recurring individual or further background on a region. You would have to widen your aperture.

Once upon a time, even the most basic, elementary school research required some real sleuthing. But it also meant picking up some fascinating, random data along the way — even if that information was just what sandwich you tore the local librarian away from because you needed help locating a copy of Time magazine from 1993.

Google, of course, simplified this. But it also opened up more opportunities for discovery. The way that the search algorithm previously worked — when it was still a lexical search — allowed you pull up any number of articles, blog posts, and so forth that simply included the keywords you used in your query. This could be overwhelming, sure, but it could also be fascinating. If you enjoyed a good rabbit hole, then hang onto your patent leather shoes, Alice.

But this was all before the enshittification of Google. This perfect word was coined by journalist Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. The idea is that many of our platforms — Google, Spotify, Amazon, etc. — have gone bad. They lock users in, then they make the product worse to extract more value. After that, they lock in the businesses (advertisers, publishers, etc.) before making it worse for them as well. Finally, we’re all trapped and everything sucks.

“There are obvious post-enshittification moments,” Doctorow told Vox. “In 2019, for example, the Google antitrust case records show an internal clash: Google had 90 percent market share in search, growth had stalled, and an executive pitched a strategy to make search worse so users would have to run multiple queries and see more ads. That’s enshittification in a nutshell — and we all kept using Google anyway.”

And how many people would really be willing to run multiple searches? I know I’m not a typical user: I have journalism brain and am trained to keep poking away and reworking my query to find a logical and appropriate source. But plenty others just accept the first search result, whatever it may be, and run with it. And beyond that, many people scan the Google AI summary that now pops up at the top of the page, and never bother to visit the primary sources that Google scraped the information from. Why wouldn’t any of us do this!! We’re only human, and our neanderthal ancestors would have LOVED a succinct answer to, “Will this mushroom be delicious or kill me?”

We’ve now seen preliminary research showing that AI very likely stunts our brains. The Guardian reported on a study that monitored people’s brain activity while they wrote essays. Some of the participants had no digital assistance as they wrote, some used an internet search engine, and a third group used ChatGPT. The researchers “found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.”

“Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature,” the study’s lead researcher Nataliya Kosmyna told The Guardian. “But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”

This is not, by any means, a case for making things harder. Please! Life is filled with plenty of little obstacles as it is. For example, there is a very good record store that I do not bother with because the bins are too tall for me and I cannot reach the back 10 albums in each. (They once rolled over a stool for me to use but then I just looked like a jaunty little gnome climbing about the electronic section. Life is difficult and embarrassing.) 

In the time that Google has enshittefied itself, we have lost a lot. A study found that a site previously ranked first in a Google Search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query, should results be delivered below an AI overview. The effect has had a devastating effect on publishers small and large — and that matters a whole lot for our curious minds.

Consider this: You want to know more about a new local tax proposal, so you search for that topic on Google. You click on a story from your town’s newspaper and, while you’re reading the update, you notice that one council person in particular is opposing the tax. You then look up information on said individual and find out they’re running for higher office and you take note of their platform. Surprise! You found a new candidate to back. Or maybe when reading about the tax proposal, you spot another story on the website about a new restaurant that just opened in your neighborhood. Surprise! You have dinner plans.

I can run this scenario many ways, yet the point is that by clicking through to relevant articles or websites, there was always an opportunity for discovery. But the less we’re clicking through — and the crappier the results we do get — the more we’re smoothing out the journey and, by extension, our brains.

Sometimes you do just need a quick Google search for the correct water-to-rice ratio (I don’t know why 2:1 eludes me??). But other times, we’re being denied the chance to putz around the shelves and grab something that catches our eyes.