Google declares the end of the World Wide Web

No company is quite so inseparable from the World Wide Web as Google, which made searching the internet an eponymous verb. The web made Google rich, too, but this week Google relegated it to a submenu. In a design of its next-generation home page that the company showed at its annual I/O developer conference this week, the demotion is quite clear.

Searching now returns a blancmange of content in special pull-out boxes, apps and features, some of it artificially generated. The days of lists of links are over — if you want to see web pages the tech giant now offers a “new ‘Web’ filter” that will refine your search to only see web pages. This may startle Generation Xers whose first taste of the online world was via a web browser, but the web has become a legacy format like the DVD.

The high hopes of the web really began three decades ago. In the spring of 1994, online communities consisted of services such as Compuserve, or bulletin boards, which were either expensive or difficult to use, as were the first internet searching tools like Gopher. But in the mid-Nineties, users launching the new Mosaic browser could soon discover how simple it was to produce these early mixed-media pages: now, anyone could publish anything.