For each of us, the Internet is immediately associated with a search engine that provides hyperlinks to web pages in response to a user’s query. These search engines have helped organize access to the world’s approximately 1.1 billion websites, although the majority of them (82%) are inactive. While there were a multitude of search engines at the advent of the Internet, Google became dominant in the 2000s and maintains a 91% global market share, with Microsoft’s Bing absorbing the rest. These tools have shaped the Web, as traffic is hugely influenced by a site’s positioning on the first page of search engines.
But this model of access to the Web, which has become a reflex, is not immutable. Many experts have thus announced the death of search with the advent of generative AI and its extended language models (LLM), supposed to be more relevant than semantic search.
This is particularly the promise of Perplexity.aiwhich, instead of providing links, aggregates information from credible sources into a single, coherent answer. This works for a small number of open-ended queries. For specific queries, such as football results, you will still use a search engine. These themselves also display an increasing amount of information, such as sports results or weather information. A trend that makes visiting dedicated websites increasingly unnecessary.
The disappearance of the Chinese web
The real threat to search engines, however, is in China. The Chinese Web is very different from its Western counterpart. Many sites are banned, content is censored. Accounts on the microblogging network Weibo can be deleted overnight. But, above all, the Web is disappearing from the Middle Kingdom, taking with it the collective memory of the country.
During May, much of the information published on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums and social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer indexed on the main search engine, Baidu, but also on secondary ones, such as Bing, from Microsoft, or the Russian Yandex. There is no longer any information on Xi Jinping’s life when he was party secretary in Zhejiang and Shanghai.
The lives of such famous Chinese entrepreneurs as Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma are reduced to zero and three connections, respectively. Coverage of the country’s deadliest natural disaster in recent decades, the Great Sichuan Earthquake of 2008 and its 69,000 deaths, is limited to articles from the central government or the state television channel. State. It is still possible to find articles by independent journalists, but only by searching for their names or their media outlets.
Beyond indexing, the number of sites is melting like snow in the sun. Of the 5.3 million sites listed in 2017, according to the country’s Internet regulator, only 3.9 million remain. Less than the number of sites in Polish and Farsi. Starving for a population of 1 billion Internet users. But this phenomenon goes beyond the Communist Party’s desire for control. China is the birthplace of “super-applications”.
For many Chinese, the Internet is WeChat and a handful of apps like Douyin, the equivalent of TikTok, or Xiaohongshu, the equivalent of Instagram. Each app has its own environment of unindexed content. To access information about an administrative process, you watch a tutorial made by a local influencer. If you want to buy tickets to visit a museum, you don’t go to the institution’s website – which hasn’t been updated for years – but you have to go through an online reservation system available only through WeChat.
As a result, the search experience offered by Baidu became disastrous, with lots of ads, low relevance and high content obsolescence. We are a long way from the 2020s, when Baidu was part of BATX, presented as the rivals of the American Gafam. Baidu is now only worth 31 billion dollars on the stock market, where Tencent and Alibaba remain valued at 456 and 181 billion.
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