If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous tthan one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%.
UX London isn’t the only event from Clearleft coming your way in 2025. There’s a brand new spin-off event dedicated to user research happening in February. It’s called Research By The Sea.
I’m not curating this one, though I will be hosting it. The curation is being carried out most excellently by Benjamin, who has written more about how he’s doing it:
We’ve invited some of the best thinkers and doers from from in the research space to explore how researchers might respond to today’s most gnarly and pressing problems. They’ll challenge current perspectives, tools, practices and thinking styles, and provide practical steps for getting started today to shape a better tomorrow.
If that sounds like your cup of tea, you should put February 27th 2025 in your calendar and grab yourself a ticket.
Although I’m not involved in curating the line-up for the event, I offered Benjamin my swor… my web dev skillz. I made the website for Research By The Sea and I really enjoyed doing it!
These one-day events are a great chance to have a bit of fun with the website. I wrote about how enjoyable it was making the website for this year’s Patterns Day:
I felt like I was truly designing in the browser. Adjusting spacing, playing around with layout, and all that squishy stuff. Some of the best results came from happy accidents—the way that certain elements behaved at certain screen sizes would lead me into little experiments that yielded interesting results.
I took the same approach with Research By The Sea. I had a design language to work with, based on UX London, but with more of a playful, brighter feel. The idea was that the website (and the event) should feel connected to UX London, while also being its own thing.
I kept the typography of the UX London site more or less intact. The page structure is also very similar. That was my foundation. From there I was free to explore some other directions.
I took the opportunity to explore some new features of CSS. But before I talk about the newer stuff, I want to mention the bits of CSS that I don’t consider new. These are the things that are just the way things are done ‘round here.
Custom properties. They’ve been around for years now, and they’re such a life-saver, especially on a project like this where I’m messing around with type, colour, and spacing. Even on a small site like this, it’s still worth having a section at the start where you define your custom properties.
Logical properties. Again, they’ve been around for years. At this point I’ve trained my brain to use them by default. Now when I see a left, right, width or height in a style sheet, it looks like a bug to me.
Fluid type. It’s kind of a natural extension of responsive design to me. If a website’s typography doesn’t adjust to my viewport, it feels slightly broken. On this project I used Utopia because I wanted different type scales as the viewport increased. On other projects I’ve just used on clamp declaration on the body element, which can also get the job done.
Okay, so those are the things that feel standard to me. So what could I play around with that was new?
View transitions. So easy! Just point to an element on two different pages and say “Hey, do a magic move!” You can see this in action with the logo as you move from the homepage to, say, the venue page. I’ve also added view transitions to the speaker headshots on the homepage so that when you click through to their full page, you get a nice swoosh.
Unless, like me, you’re using Firefox. In that case, you won’t see any view transitions. That’s okay. They are very much an enhancement. Speaking of which…
Scroll-driven animations. You’ll only get these in Chromium browsers right now, but again, they’re an enhancement. I’ve got multiple background images—a bunch of cute SVG shapes. I’m using scroll-driven animations to change the background positions and sizes as you scroll. It’s a bit silly, but hopefully kind of cute.
You might be wondering how I calculated the movements of each background image. Good question. I basically just messed around with the values. I had fun! But imagine what an actually-skilled interaction designer could do.
That brings up an interesting observation about both view transitions and scroll-driven animations: Figma will not help you here. You need to be in a web browser with dev tools popped open. You’ve got to roll up your sleeves get your hands into the machine. I know that sounds intimidating, but it’s also surprisingly enjoyable and empowering.
Oh, and I made sure to wrap both the view transitions and the scroll-driven animations in a prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference @media query.
I’m pleased with how the website turned out. It feels fun. More importantly, it feels fast. There is zero JavaScript. That’s the main reason why it’s very, very performant (and accessible).
Smooth transitions across pages; smooth animations as you scroll: it’s great what you can do with just HTML and CSS.
At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.
Google search is no friend to the indie web:
Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Information that you might search for may never appear in Google’s results. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.
The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.
But that instability was always there.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Google is not a huge source of traffic and visibility. I get most of my visits from RSS readers, other people’s links including fellow bloggers, or websites like Hacker News. It’s hard to tell at this point since I don’t track anything, but that’s an educated guess.
Removing my website from Google would have very little impact, so I was wondering if I should just do it.
My phone rang today. I didn’t recognise the number so although I pressed the big button to answer the call, I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything because usually when I get a call from a number I don’t know, it’s some automated spam. If I say nothing, the spam voice doesn’t activate.
But sometimes it’s not a spam call. Sometimes after a few seconds of silence a human at the other end of the call will say “Hello?” in an uncertain tone. That’s the point when I respond with a cheery “Hello!” of my own and feel bad for making this person endure those awkward seconds of silence.
Those spam calls have made me so suspicious that real people end up paying the price. False positives caught in my spam-detection filter.
Now it’s happening on the web.
I wrote about how Google search, Bing, and Mozilla Developer network are squandering trust:
Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it.
But it’s not just limited to specific companies. I’ve noticed more and more suspicion related to any online activity.
I’ve seen members of a community site jump to the conclusion that a new member’s pattern of behaviour was a sure sign that this was a spambot. But it could just as easily have been the behaviour of someone who isn’t neurotypical or who doesn’t speak English as their first language.
Jessica was looking at some pictures on an AirBnB listing recently and found herself examining some photos that seemed a little too good to be true, questioning whether they were in fact output by some generative tool.
Every email that lands in my inbox is like a little mini Turing test. Did a human write this?
Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion.
This is most apparent with web search. We’ve always needed to filter search results through our own personal lenses, but now it’s like playing whack-a-mole. First we have to find workarounds for avoiding slop, and then when we click through to a web page, we have to evaluate whether’s it’s been generated by some SEO spammer making full use of the new breed of content-production tools.
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about how this could spell doom for the web. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It might well spell doom for web search, but I’m okay with that.
Back before its enshittification—an enshittification that started even before all the recent AI slop—Google solved the problem of accurate web searching with its PageRank algorithm. Before that, the only way to get to trusted information was to rely on humans.
Humans made directories like Yahoo! or DMOZ where they categorised links. Humans wrote blog posts where they linked to something that they, a human, vouched for as being genuinely interesting.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Look, there’s even a new directory devoted to cataloging blogs: websites made by humans. Life finds a way.
All of the spam and slop that’s making us so suspicious may end up giving us a new appreciation for human curation.
It wouldn’t be a straightforward transition to move away from search. It would be uncomfortable. It would require behaviour change. People don’t like change. But when needs must, people adapt.
The first bit of behaviour change might be a rediscovery of bookmarks. It used to be that when you found a source you trusted, you bookmarked it. Browsers still have bookmarking functionality but most people rely on search. Maybe it’s time for a bookmarking revival.
A step up from that would be using a feed reader. In many ways, a feed reader is a collection of bookmarks, but all of the bookmarks get polled regularly to see if there are any updates. I love using my feed reader. Everything I’ve subscribed to in there is made by humans.
The ultimate bookmark is an icon on the homescreen of your phone or in the dock of your desktop device. A human source you trust so much that you want it to be as accessible as any app.
Right now the discovery mechanism for that is woeful. I really want that to change. I want a web that empowers people to connect with other people they trust, without any intermediary gatekeepers.
The evangelists of large language models (who may coincidentally have invested heavily in the technology) like to proclaim that a slop-filled future is inevitable, as though we have no choice, as though we must simply accept enshittification as though it were a force of nature.
But we can always walk away.
In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products.
Google is acting as though its greatest asset is its search engine. Same with Bing.
Mozilla Developer Network is acting as though its greatest asset is its documentation. Same with Stack Overflow.
But their greatest asset is actually trust.
If I use a search engine I need to be able to trust that the filtering is good. If I look up documentation I need to trust that the information is good. I don’t expect perfection, but I also don’t expect to have to constantly be thinking “was this generated by a large language model, and if so, how can I know it’s not hallucinating?”
“But”, the apologists will respond, “the results are mostly correct! The documentation is mostly true!”
Sure, but as Terence puts it:
The intern who files most things perfectly but has, more than once, tipped an entire cup of coffee into the filing cabinet is going to be remembered as “that klutzy intern we had to fire.”
Trust is a precious commodity. It takes a long time to build trust. It takes a short time to destroy it.
I am honestly astonished that so many companies don’t seem to realise what they’re destroying.
I don’t use Google Search myself—I use Duck Duck Go—but if you do, here’s how to avoid the slop.
UX London is just two months away!
The best way to enjoy the event is to go for all three days but if that’s not doable for you, each individual day is kind of like a mini-conference with its own theme.
The theme on day one, Tuesday, June 18th is design research.
In the morning there are four fantastic talks.
After lunch you’ll take part in one of four workshops. Choose wisely!
After your workshop there’s one final closing keynote to bring everyone back together. I’m keeping that secret for just a little longer, but trust me, it’s going to be inspiring—plenty to discuss at the drinks reception afterwards.
That’s quite a packed day. If design research is what you’re into, you won’t want to miss it. Get your ticket now.
Just to sweeten the deal and as a reward for reading all the way to the end, here’s a discount code you can use to get a whopping 20% off: JOINJEREMY.
My presumption that one should examine evidence before reaching a conclusion, rather than using it to support a conclusion, was not even an idea they could understand well enough to reject.
I am not against trying to be persuasive. That is a necessary art. But I was shaken they could not conceive of any use of information other than persuasion.
It’s a dream team of former Clearlefties: Harry and Cennydd joined forces to investigate and write an in-depth report looking into deceptive design practices used by Microsoft to stop people changing their default browser from Edge. They don’t pull their punches:
We judge that Microsoft cannot justify the use of these techniques, and should stop using them immediately. If they do not, we would welcome – where the law provides for it – regulatory intervention to protect against these harms.
No argument from me.
On the sad state of Google search today:
How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town?
I’m not down with Google swallowing everything posted on the internet to train their generative AI models.
This would mean a lot more if it happened before the wholesale harvesting of everyone’s work.
But I’m sure Google will put a mighty fine lock on that stable door that the horse bolted from.
Back when the web was young, it wasn’t yet clear what the rules were. Like, could you really just link to something without asking permission?
Then came some legal rulings to establish that, yes, on the web you can just link to anything without checking if it’s okay first.
What about search engines and directories? Technically they’re rifling through all the stuff we publish and reposting snippets of it. Is that okay?
Again, through some legal precedents—but mostly common agreement—everyone decided that on balance it was fine. After all, those snippets they publish are helping your site get traffic.
In short order, search came to rule the web. And Google came to rule search.
The mutually beneficial arrangement persisted uneasily. Despite Google’s search results pages getting worse and worse in recent years, the company’s huge market share of search means you generally want to be in their good books.
Google’s business model relies on us publishing web pages so that they can put ads around the search results linking to that content, and we rely on Google to send people to our websites by responding smartly to search queries.
That has now changed. Instead of responding to search queries by linking to the web pages we’ve made, Google is instead generating dodgy summaries rife with hallucina… lies (a psychic hotline, basically).
Google still benefits from us publishing web pages. We no longer benefit from Google slurping up those web pages.
With AI, tech has broken the web’s social contract:
Google has steadily been manoeuvring their search engine results to more and more replace the pages in the results.
Me, I just think it’s fuckin’ rude.
Google is a portal to the web. Google is an amazing tool for finding relevant websites to go to. That was useful when it was made, and it’s nothing but grown in usefulness. Google should be encouraging and fighting for the open web. But now they’re like, actually we’re just going to suck up your website, put it in a blender with all other websites, and spit out word smoothies for people instead of sending them to your website. Instead.
Ben proposes an update to robots.txt that would allow us to specify licensing information:
Robots.txt needs an update for the 2020s. Instead of just saying what content can be indexed, it should also grant rights.
Like crawl my site only to provide search results not train your LLM.
It’s a solid proposal. But Google has absolutely no incentive to implement it. They hold all the power.
Or do they?
There is still the nuclear option in robots.txt:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
That’s what Vasilis is doing:
I have been looking for ways to not allow companies to use my stuff without asking, and so far I coulnd’t find any. But since this policy change I realised that there is a simple one: block google’s bots from visiting your website.
The general consensus is that this is nuts. “If you don’t appear in Google’s results, you might as well not be on the web!” is the common cry.
I’m not so sure. At least when it comes to personal websites, search isn’t how people get to your site. They get to your site from RSS, newsletters, links shared on social media or on Slack.
And isn’t it an uncomfortable feeling to think that there’s a third party service that you absolutely must appease? It’s the same kind of justification used by people who are still on Twitter even though it’s now a right-wing transphobic cesspit. “If I’m not on Twitter, I might as well not be on the web!”
The situation with Google reminds me of what Robin said about Twitter:
The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.
We can rescind our invitation to Google.