How Google Used One Line of Code (&num=100) to Quietly Take Control of the Internet and AI
They removed a single search parameter, and in doing so, reminded every AI company who’s really in charge of the web. This is the power play no one is talking about.
Did you feel it? A tiny shift on the internet last month?
Probably not. But behind the scenes, Google made a quiet change that sent shockwaves through the digital world, and most people didn’t even notice.
I’ve been digging into this, and in this article, I’ll break down what happened, why it matters, and what it reveals about who really controls the web.
What Just Happened? Let Me Simplify It.
For years, there was a little trick you could use on Google.
By adding &num=100 to the end of a search URL, you could tell Google, “Hey, show me 100 search results on one page instead of the usual 10.”
It was a power-user feature. SEOs, researchers, and data scrapers loved it because it let them see a huge chunk of the web at once.
