HN Explorer

Where the Web Is Heading

10 points by hollerith ↗ HN
A prediction: starting no later than 15 years from today and persisting for at least 3 years, more than half of the web's "legitimate" page views will consist of a machine-learning model's scanning the page, then telling the user what the page says than will consist of the user's interacting with the page the way users do now.

More precisely the user will interact with the model, and only the model will interact with the web page (modulo the user's initial request for the page).

For the purposes of this prediction, a "legitimate" page view is defined as one in which a human user requests a particular page, then the page or the machine-learning model's description is downloaded over the internet to whatever computer on the network is closest to the user.

3 comments

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rektide
Seems outlandish but I'm hoping eventually we see a semantic-web revival, that the page itself has some mark up describing what is on the page & what affordances are available within the different things on the page.

The ML take is an interesting one! Hadn't considered that.

guidovranken
I think there will be a great new way of search and content discovery. Google (as a search engine) is well beyond its prime, it's all spam from page 3 onward. It's still the same system as 20 years ago except with more spam. I think we can do much better through a fundamentally different approach and this is an avenue I'd explore if I were an entrepreneur. Even shaving off a few percent of Google/Bing's market share could be quite lucrative.
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