When Google was launched in 1998, it was a simple search engine with basic links to web pages. 25 years later, the service has evolved so much that searching the web is becoming a simple filter.
From now on, if you want to search for information on the web and nothing else, you will have to do another manipulation on Google. Parallel to its important annual developer conference, the company announced the arrival of a new option in its search engine: the web filter.
10 blue links and you’re done
With the arrival of Gemini in Google searches, the place occupied by Shopping or Image searches for various queries as well as YouTube video carousels on all results pages, Google wanted to offer an option for those who simply want to return to the search results of yesteryear, with the 10 beast blue links per page.
The “web” filter, which will now coexist alongside the traditional “Images”, “Videos” and “News”, will therefore offer an experience devoid of all the features put in place by Google over the years. No AI summaries, information pulled from web pages, or Wikipedia sidebars, the tool will allow you to “simply see links in your search results,” says the company’s X account.
For the company, such a filter can be useful if you have “a device with limited access to the internet”, if you are looking for “more complex sources” than those that have been digested by the AI, or simply if you “want to have access to text search results” without the burden of all the additional features now offered by the company’s search engine.
A symbolic change for Google
By implication, we can guess that Google will integrate Gemini results into its classic search page by default, and that they can’t be turned off. For those looking for a less augmented (and less cluttered?) experience, the “web” filter will serve as a haven. The availability of this option should not be long in coming, according to the announcements made by the company, but it will probably take some time to arrive on the old continent and on the computers of all users.
Symbolically, the availability of this filter that brings back the beasts of blue links in their simplest form shows just how complex Google search has become (or worse for some) in recent years. Over time, more and more ancillary elements have been added to the results page, sometimes offering an experience that is not easy to grasp. It also shows that pure search is no longer Google’s priority, which has turned the historic heart of its search engine into a straightforward option for fussy internet users.
