Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse

gist

Vass Bednar argues that worsening Google results are one symptom of a deeper retrieval crisis: original webpages are disappearing, AI summaries obscure or contaminate sources, and institutions that preserve the web are losing traffic, money, and access. Because information retrieval shapes cultural memory and state capacity, she treats search as public infrastructure. Canada can reduce dependency by funding preservation, choosing privacy-respecting defaults, and reviving its tradition of publicly oriented digital systems.

ideas

• Retrieval failure is also archival failure. Better queries cannot recover sources that have rotted, been deleted, or become undiscoverable behind generated answers.
• AI degrades both ends of search. Summaries interpose errors between readers and sources while attempts to influence those summaries contaminate the underlying corpus.
• Discovery determines cultural sovereignty. A country cannot control its collective memory if foreign platforms decide which records remain findable.
• Public knowledge needs durable institutions. Wikipedia and the Internet Archive cannot indefinitely carry preservation duties through volunteer labor, donations, and fragile crawler access.
• Canada has usable precedents. CANARIE, SchoolNet, the Community Access Program, and the Public Knowledge Project show that public-interest digital infrastructure is practical.

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