Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse

It turns out a lot of people ask Google when the sun will set. It’s a good fact to know. Getting a ballpark on twilight can help you plan a bike ride, barbecue, or a perfectly timed promposal. The occurrence lasts only between two and a half and four minutes, and it happens dynamically depending on your proximity to the equator, making it a tricky event to keep tabs on.

Recently, sunset chasers have been missing the main event because Google’s new AI summaries started inventing times. “I had the projector set up outside and was waiting for the sun to set,” wrote one Facebook user in Colorado Springs, “but to my surprise I was simply living in the past. AI informed me the sunset had already happened.” These episodes point to something many have noticed: the world’s dominant search engine now struggles over basic facts. The company that built its reputation returning the right answer has, as one tech expert observed, “lost its edge.”

Still, we keep googling because we keep expecting the internet to know things. That stubborn hope underpins almost every argument about information access. When search worsens, we grumble that Google has been enshittified. When AI hallucinates, we say the model is sloppy. When misinformation spreads, we reassure ourselves the truth is still “out there,” waiting patiently for us to string together a better query. Even as the web is polluted by AI slop, we cling to the belief it’s a skills problem and share search tips.

But what if the “truth” is harder to find online because the infrastructure that once stored it is breaking down? Some of that is wear and tear. Link rot erases pages every day. Key sections of the United States Constitution briefly disappeared from the Library of Congress website because of a coding error. But by interposing an error-prone AI between us and an original source, Google has ensured that if an underlying page exists, it can become practically undiscoverable. Meanwhile, pollution is now moving upstream: 404 Media reports companies are planting content on Reddit to influence the answers generated by AI search, contaminating the public record from which those systems draw their summaries.

The corpus is collapsing in real time. This degraded digital space should force a broader understanding of cultural sovereignty. Right now, the debate is framed largely as a fight over whether foreign mega platforms like Netflix, YouTube, or Spotify should support Canadian content. That charged conversation sidesteps the deeper question: Who preserves and controls access to our cultural record—not just in the present but for generations after?

Search can no longer pretend to be a neutral gateway to a stable body of knowledge. While the web has always been organized around intermediaries that shape what survives online and who sees it, the internet’s archival function is today breaking down under relentless pressure from stakeholders with very different—and often conflicting—priorities. At least book banning happens in your face: it has villains, school board meetings, sensational headlines. Digital erasure is more insidious and, in some ways, more devastating. A banned book can still be found. A scrubbed webpage can disappear so completely few people would ever realize it was there.

Consider what happened to FiveThirtyEight, an American website that focused on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging. The Walt Disney Company had owned the blog through its subsidiaries for more than a decade. Its founder, Nate Silver, left in 2023, and by March 2025, the remaining staff had been laid off. Once Disney concluded the site was no longer an active asset—no new journalism and no meaningful advertising revenue—it straight up deleted nearly the entire archive.

The retrieval crisis has reached even Wikipedia, one of the world’s most significant volunteer-run public knowledge resources. For years, search engines sent billions of viewers to its pages. But now, AI systems scrape and ingest Wikipedia’s content directly when presenting their results, eliminating the need for users to click through. Wikipedia has become the infrastructure of its own demise: dwindling traffic means attention and donations no longer reliably flow back to the encyclopedia to keep it alive.

What has been happening to the Internet Archive is just as alarming. A non-profit digital library, it collects and makes available materials that might otherwise vanish—from audio recordings to historical documents to books. It is best known for the Wayback Machine, a service that has captured hundreds of billions of snapshots of the web at different points in time. Journalists, researchers, historians, lawyers, and the public use it to recover deleted pages, verify past statements, and document changes to online content. The Wayback Machine is the closest thing the web has to a fail-safe backup memory.

The overall project, however, is not only buckling under the engineering strain of indexing and storing an ever-growing repository of information but it is also being battered by cyberattacks and costly litigation. After publishers successfully sued the Internet Archive over its digital lending program, calling it unauthorized copying, news organizations started blocking the Wayback Machine’s crawlers out of fear that archived pages can provide AI companies with an indirect source of copyrighted material. Each new restriction limits the archive’s ability to act as a comprehensive backstop.

Even the increasing use of ephemeral formats like Instagram Stories and WhatsApp status updates means that large portions of cultural, social, and political communication are never conserved in the first place. As a society, we can probably survive bad search results and come up with another way to schedule a sunset make-out session. But we can’t aspire to sovereignty if we can’t retain and retrieve our collective memory.

For now, you can still use Google to find out how other governments are building alternatives to it. France has come to treat foreign platforms as a threat to both technological sovereignty and national cybersecurity. In a prescient late 2018 move, the country’s national assembly and the ministry of the armed forces began adopting Qwant, a French service hosted in Europe. Qwant operates on a different model: it doesn’t store search data, sell personal information, or use targeted advertising based on your browsing history. The European Parliament, with its 720 elected members as well as thousands of administrative staff, also made the switch, reflecting the growing belief that information retrieval is a strategic asset in its own right.

Every small breakup with Big Tech cracks open the door wider on what’s possible. France now requires civil servants to use Tchap, a homegrown messaging app replacing foreign platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal in government communications. European governments have followed suit on the push away from Silicon Valley, swapping out Microsoft products with open-source alternatives across hundreds of thousands of workstations. The European Commission just announced it would join W Social, a new independent social site created by a Swedish start-up. As Denmark’s digitalization minister, Caroline Stage Olsen, put it: “Far too much public digital infrastructure is today tied up with very few foreign suppliers. This makes us vulnerable.”

That fighting mood is pushing some countries to go even further. In a ruling that could become a landmark precedent, a German court recently held Google liable for false statements generated by its AI overview feature. The case arose after Google’s AI wrongly linked two publishing companies to scammy business practices. Because the search engine extracts and rewrites information in its own words, the court reasoned, it is doing more than impartially pointing users toward the public record. It’s authoring an entirely new layer of content—and with that comes editorial responsibility. If foreign technology firms can no longer claim to be a passive conduit for information, governments could have greater latitude in regulating them.

Google is appealing the decision, but the point has been made: looking after the information economy can no longer be a side project for underfunded institutions. Wikipedia is as miraculous as the Wayback Machine is indispensable. Still, we need to stop pretending volunteerism alone can hold up the public internet. We understand this duty more clearly in other domains. After all, roads aren’t governed by ride-sharing companies; payment apps don’t set monetary policy; cloud service providers don’t dictate national security frameworks (at least not yet). Yet we have been shockingly casual about governing our digital dependencies.

It’s hard to imagine a country that had its AI strategy blessed by Google’s chief economist choosing to stop routing the everyday policy work of the state through an advertising company. Switching over to a privacy-preserving default would reduce unnecessary data leakage and signal that public institutions treat search as an infrastructure key to our digital sovereignty rather than a “free” consumer service.

Information has economic value; even when individual searches look mundane, the aggregate pattern can surface quite sensitive insights about a society and its citizens. If governments want to get serious about actually governing the intangible economy, they must first govern the conditions that make information durable and discoverable. We wouldn’t be starting entirely from scratch. We have pieces of this kind of public-interest architecture kicking around: Library and Archives Canada, which preserves federal web records and other historical information, and the Internet Archive Canada, which works in tandem with the main organization and hosts data backups at Canadian universities.

Canada has built this kind of digital infrastructure before. CANARIE—originally, the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education—helped create a national research and education network for universities, researchers, and innovators. In the 1990s, SchoolNet and the Community Access Program brought schools and libraries online way before connectivity was taken for granted. The Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University gave the world Open Journal Systems, helping thousands of scholarly journals publish outside the grip of major commercial platforms, beginning in 2002. MapleMusic built an online market for Canadian music before streaming swallowed cultural discovery. These projects shared a premise we should recover: Canada does not have to wait for private platforms to organize and control our digital lives.

The sun is setting on the old bargain with Google: give us your curiosity and we will give you the world. What rises next could be stranger and much more synthetic: an internet randomly remembered by machines and monetized by intermediaries. Or it could be something sturdier: a public internet treated as infrastructure, with historical memory preserved not because it is profitable but because it is ours.

The future of public knowledge will depend not only on what exists but on who has the initiative and incentives to preserve it. Even this article won’t be online forever. Should it?