Unlinked: How The Web Is Becoming Less Searchable, Not More

Modern mobile apps are like Interstellar’s black hole — they look cool, but they suck in everything you hold dear.

When we, the consumers, first got the Internet, it was barely searchable. You had to remember things, and lots of what was happening didn’t come with a search function. Spending time in ICQ, Microsoft’s Messenger, or on bulletin boards required you to remember things. That was OK.

Twenty years later, Google dominates our brain’s “digital memory”, so we rely more and more on searching data on almost anything on the internet.

However, as we entered mobile age, we are slowly descending back to the world of unlinked — things that aren’t searchable or available.

Think where your conversations happen—Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, and so on. Even if the conversation is public, for example, belonging to the large group of people, you won’t be able to search it using Google. What’s more, you can’t even search it within the app too, as majority of apps, like Snapchat, Messenger, Line, WeChat, or WhatsApp don’t have integrated search to remind you of the conversation you had.

I recently started reading the book, recommended to me by our investors, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (in fact, I got it at a16z Summit in Las Vegas), named “The Inevitable”. Kevin Kelly, the author, promises that we will enter more searchable world — from apps to real world (so finding home keys won’t ever be an issue). However, I’d argue that in the last 6 years (roughly since Instagram and Facebook became dominant force on mobile), we have seen more and more information disappear into a black hole of unsearchable mobile apps.

First time it took me by surprise when a friend showed me a thread with hundreds of people and thousands of comments, discussing 500px in China. That was happening in some, obscure for the Western world, but popular with Chinese, gossip-type app. There are hundreds of people, discussing how to make money with 500px (and cut corners by cheating), and yet, you simply can’t find a trace of this conversation using Google or even Baidu.

So now, as more and more consumer behaviour shifts to mobile — or, to be more correct, younger generation in developing countries doesn’t even bother with “desktop/laptop” behaviour to begin with—we are having more fragmented and isolated bits of your personal data, connecting which becomes increasingly harder, as large corporations fight for the control over your data and your life.

Unless companies let us consumers choose what and how we want to have our data stored, and allow exchange of data, with user’s consent, between the apps, we will be stuck in the “dark age” of mobile, forced to remember conversations between half a dozen of messenger apps.

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