3 ms·

I've been thinking about this recently, too. This was just on the front page of HN yesterday: "Does anyone remember websites?" https://news.ycombinator.com/

I've been thinking about this recently, too. This was just on the front page of HN yesterday: "Does anyone remember websites?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631565 "Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web. The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet."

ksangeelee 9y ago
Thanks - that post had been on my readar, but got forgotten. The paragraph you quote pretty much sums up my feelings, though I'm not particularly concerned with finding old school sites. Google used to do a good job of answering technical questions, as well as finding the little gems of originality (and lots of lovely mediocrity too, of course). I don't think the two need be mutually exclusive. It's just that what I consider the good stuff is lost in the attention seeking nonsense that the web has become. Filter that out, and I have a feeling that lots of great stuff will become a lot more accessible. wiby is wonderful, I had a play around and found pangs of nostalgia, and stuff that made me laugh out loud. But I think the criteria of lightness of a site, for example, the amount of JavaScript used, means it will be missing many great contemporary sites that happen to use the technology of today.

ksangeelee 9y ago

Thanks - that post had been on my readar, but got forgotten. The paragraph you quote pretty much sums up my feelings, though I'm not particularly concerned with finding old school sites. Google used to do a good job of answering technical questions, as well as finding the little gems of originality (and lots of lovely mediocrity too, of course). I don't think the two need be mutually exclusive. It's just that what I consider the good stuff is lost in the attention seeking nonsense that the web has become. Filter that out, and I have a feeling that lots of great stuff will become a lot more accessible. wiby is wonderful, I had a play around and found pangs of nostalgia, and stuff that made me laugh out loud. But I think the criteria of lightness of a site, for example, the amount of JavaScript used, means it will be missing many great contemporary sites that happen to use the technology of today.