The Last Google Search

I was on google trends the other day because it’s fun. I type in two completely different things in different fields and see who’s winning. The competition has to be fair, and magnitude of fame has to be factored in like weight-classes lest one entry completely stomps out the others. It scratches my itch for gambling and looking at stock-tickers.

One day I did the thing you’re not supposed to do with measurement tools. I measured the tool by putting “google trends” into google trends. The results were unremarkable. It peaked on its inception, with steady decline since. Some moderate interest in the later half of the 2010s, and then a dip, and then a bunch of random noise that often follows obscurity or stagnation.

The noise spoke to me more than the downward trend. Google trends, the thing that tracks what people care about is itself something people care about less. Well, maybe not. Maybe the heavyweight companies are just using it through the API. I came to the conclusion is that google is circumventing their own search system to get there. They didn’t want to go on google trends directly—and certainly not search for it like me. But then a bigger thing hit me:

Who wants to go to a website anymore?

In 2024, nearly 60% of google searches end without the user ever clicking a link. Today, it’s even higher. You search, find an answer by gemini or even the native shortcuts that google offered at the beginning of the page and then are off. It’s worked so well that most sites hide their useful information—which could work, as long as Gemini wasn’t there to provide an answer.

Google was once the hallway among grand rooms. Plumbing if you prefer. Every other giant of the post-dotcom era — facebook, youtube, amazon, twitter? those are nouns. But we Google things. And previously, one would have thought that google would fall in popularity if the sites it led to weren’t popular anymore. But that’s no longer true.

Google is now unlearning their original success of getting people off of google as fast as possible. They want to be a room of their own. If it works too well, Googling may soon bow to Google—or Alphabet, whatever. They’re putting a welcome mat on the boarding station. They, too, now wish to keep users on their site, and make the hallway rival the rooms it once led to.

Did you know? Nobody knows what the first google search was. No ribbon cutting whatsoever! Before it was google, it was called Backrub. Not ten to the hundred, but rather one on one. No one measures the first heartbeat if the gist is finding its rhythm.

The beginning was too small to document. But I need no seer to prophesy that the last google search will be the opposite. Not today, not soon, but eventually queries will taper. And despite it all, that last query will be logged. It will sit in a database on a server somewhere. We will be able to know the person who made it, their history, and the exact computer it was made on. but no one will probably care.

So many people care about the last voyage that the Ship of Theseus had; but who cares whether the planks will move on to other boats, and which boat will be the last the plank furnishes before rotting beyond repair? Perhaps Google will be absorbed privately as a branch of another corp and no one will know. Perhaps we will never know what the last search was before it got watered down. But I suspect we’ll know the boat’s last voyage.

For technology like Google, we often know the last better than the first. The mechanisms of recording catch up to the machine itself. But that asymmetry is itself opposite of how we view ourselves.

Humans build entire rituals around arrival. but we have no idea when we stop doing things. the last time a parent picked you up? you don’t know it’s the last time, so you don’t mark it. Otherwise you’d probably try to flout it--one more time!!--like the way your body does when it knows you’re trying to sleep.

Humans are born into a world where the recording mechanisms (our parents, society, cameras) already exist, so our beginnings are captured perfectly. But we die slowly through the fading of habits, which no one measures. Technology, however, is born before its recording mechanisms exist, so its birth is invisible. But by the time it dies, it has built an empire of surveillance around itself, guaranteeing its death will be recorded in high-definition metadata.

I recall a passage in The Wheel and the Wing, chapter 24. It’s about a man in a wheelchair meeting a harpy. Mitka was typing to his friend Wallis, who had already lost the war:

Your sponsors only buy your bonds because they think they’re collectible. Right now, that is the only thing keeping you afloat.

Little did Mitka know that Wallis was dead, his account hijacked by the very enemy who’d killed him. Twas not an Indian summer like Mitka had thought, but a frostbite he mistook for burns. So too are we typing our questions into the same box, talking to the same friend, completely unaware that the original hallway died years ago.

If failure is kept afloat by its fame, so too may the success of the noun replace the verb. No longer will the seed lead to the world; instead, googling may only lead to google.