Weeknote 01-19

This month, a scientific study from Germany found that search engine results are getting worse, to nobody's surprise, in part to AI.

I've observed this decrease in result quality happening over the last few years (decade, even) as have many others in indie web circles. As with many problems on the modern web, there is a lack of intelligent curation and moderation that is being exploited for profit, and in my opinion it'll be hard if not impossible for search engines to do anything to remedy it in the long term.

But we are starting to see people experiment again with alternative forms of web navigation: manually curated directory listings, link aggregators like Lemmy, and the resurrection of the webring. I've added a links section to my website and will be starting to populate it with useful and interesting resources as I discover them, but what I'm really hoping for is to see someone create a federated discovery service inspired by StumbleUpon.

Next week I'll be joining my colleagues in a design sprint, which will be an interesting experience. We'll also be starting work on the RSS feed that I mentioned in my last post. And plenty of code refactoring, including dropping our storybook-based design system in favour of a combination of Figma files and hardcoded component demo pages within our main codebase.