From surfing to services — the history of the web

Do you remember the era of the internet when you SURFED the web? More or less randomly hopping from one web site to the next, via hyperlinks? This was when Yahoo! dominated the internet. (Yahoo stands for Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle… a library of links, manually organised. Imagine that.)

Then came the era of SEARCH, where every journey on the web started with a search query or a question. Google took over as king of the web.

But it didn’t take long until the web became SOCIAL and almost all our interaction with the internet started to take place inside the closed walls of social networks in the hunt for likes and recognition.

For the past 1.5 decades or so, SEARCH and SOCIAL have been competing for our attention (and advertising money). But, with the rise of AI-generators for art and text, we might be about to enter a new era of the web.

Instead of asking questions and expecting answers (as we did with SEARCH), we now have SERVICES that can do actual work for us, by simply giving them directions in the shape of a prompt.

Instead of searching for information that I can put in my report, I can ask to have the report written for me.

Instead of searching for a picture of a dog on a surfboard, I can have a pictured rendered for me.

We’re going from “find information for me” to “do stuff for me”.