A wild duck chase

Max Freeman-Mills goes back to basics online - and feels better for it

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Time for a very prosaic thought experiment: roll the clock back a decade in your mind, and search for something on Google. Anything, really, but for the sake of argument, let's say you're looking up your favourite sports team. Chances are that whether you're on mobile or desktop, back in 2015, you're within a very short distance of the site or information you wanted almost the instant you hit the search button.

Now do it in 2025, and tell me the results are better. I just looked up Liverpool FC while writing this piece, and got a collage of supposedly viral news stories, an expandable snippet of the league table, a huge summary of the club's most recent game and even a chunky box linking me to a totally random person posting about the club on X (a social media site you currently couldn't pay me to visit).