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> Perhaps these same people were not alive in the 90s to see how bad things were then. I was alive, and my memory is quite different: web search was way more u
by starsinspace 9y ago
> Perhaps these same people were not alive in the 90s to see how bad things were then.
I was alive, and my memory is quite different: web search was way more useful back then. Yes, sure, the search engines were simpler. They were more about searching exact text phrases, and less about "guessing" what you meant, or auto-correcting the spelling in your query. But the web itself was different too - a web search with the engines back then usually returned a list of sites relevant to what I was searching for. These days, so many google searches result in a long list of clickbait, crappy content farms, shopping sites, fake "review" sites, fake blogs, malware/crapware download sites, sketchy "best price search" sites, and so on and on. IMO web search just keeps getting more useless over time.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rsoto 9y agoI was alive as well, and just barely starting to get into coding, so my analysis will not be very accurate. However, in a pre-google web, most sites would add thousands of keywords to their meta tags, hoping that even when the site was not relevant for most of those keywords, they would get the click, get paid by the ads and be incentivised to create more. And since in those days the concept of relevance (and all that the page rank brought) was still far away, the sites themselves had to catalogue themselves, thus creating the keyword spam. I remember jumping between search engines; Excite, Altavista, Yahoo, and not getting very relevant results.