We spent thirty years building the web for human eyes. We may have gotten it wrong.
I. The Last Time You Clicked a Blue Link.
Think back. When did you last open a search engine and feel genuinely satisfied with what came back? Not tolerant. Not resigned. Actually satisfied the way you feel when someone answers your question instead of handing you a stack of pamphlets and wishing you luck.
For most of us, that moment has already passed. We stopped searching and started asking. We got tired of the blue link lottery the SEO slop, the affiliate farms, the endless scrolling through ten pages of noise to find one sentence of signal. Quietly, without fanfare, we made a different choice.
We didn't abandon search. Search abandoned us first.
