“This potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them, to a top-down web where that’s doubly or triply mediated by browsers, search engines and social networks.

This could be how the web dies: not with a sudden migration to bespoke client apps, but by drifting into a silo so big that most of us don’t even notice that anything has changed at all.”