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Typical article of the sort these days: 1) pretentious journalist wanting to link it to politics. Picks 2 or 3 "good" examples (like the MDH) to make their poi

Typical article of the sort these days: 1) pretentious journalist wanting to link it to politics. Picks 2 or 3 "good" examples (like the MDH) to make their point 2) commentors on HN or elsewhere jumping on everything with a notion of nostalgia 3) smarter pundits trying to explain why the older "solutions" aren't "perfect" My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old. Try installing a blacklist extension and blacklist all news sites and take a look at what remains. I have no doubt this is algorithmically driven. This is what's wrong with the Internet today. And Neocities or whatever else ain't gonna fix it.

Swizec 6y ago
Google’s algorithm is weird when it comes to this. Yes they downscore anything old. But sometimes they decide an old thing is the perfect answer for all time. And so if you google 60*60 my article about newbie programming mistakes with time shows up above even the google calculator. It’s been unchanged for almost 5 years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- codetrotter 6y ago
  On mobile I get only the calculator in the result, and a button with “more results”. But when I press the button and the results from the web are shown, then your site with the article you mentioned is the first result indeed. So contrary to what the sibling suggested, it’s not just you that it is showing this for. And I probably live in a different country than you even. I live in Norway.
manicdee 6y ago
Funding for archival services is hardly politics. Commenters anywhere are going to bring up “the good old days” in relation to anything. This is called “being human.” Your personal conclusion doesn’t fit the facts presented in the article: stuff disappears because it is not maintained. Dead links are such an issue that there are businesses who are paid to watch out for dead links in websites and determine whether the target is actually gone, has moved to a new URL or is just temporarily missing. Businesses like “Link Alarm” aren’t politics, they are just dealing with reality.
Apocryphon 6y ago
I suppose one political angle is that long before the current Age of FAANG, corporate consolidation of the web during the '00s led to the dilution of websites and their downfall- see News Corp. buying MySpace, Yahoo! buying GeoCities, even the AOL-Time Warner merger. On the other hand, that's a pretty simplistic reading of the situation of web sites that were all behind the times in their own ways, and you can also point out to non-consolidated websites whose financial downfalls destroyed a lot of internet history- Photobucket and ImageShack paywalling everything and the demise of a ton of other image-hosting services also happened as well.
mlok 6y ago
https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ This search engine remove the top million top websites from its results
nickjj 6y ago
> My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old. I think it depends. I have some technical posts that are ~3 years old and they're my most popular posts by orders of magnitude. I'm not an SEO expert but if you're writing about topical things, then that could explain why you might be losing rankings / traffic after a few months.

Swizec 6y ago

Google’s algorithm is weird when it comes to this. Yes they downscore anything old. But sometimes they decide an old thing is the perfect answer for all time. And so if you google 60*60 my article about newbie programming mistakes with time shows up above even the google calculator. It’s been unchanged for almost 5 years.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
codetrotter 6y ago
On mobile I get only the calculator in the result, and a button with “more results”. But when I press the button and the results from the web are shown, then your site with the article you mentioned is the first result indeed. So contrary to what the sibling suggested, it’s not just you that it is showing this for. And I probably live in a different country than you even. I live in Norway.

manicdee 6y ago

Funding for archival services is hardly politics. Commenters anywhere are going to bring up “the good old days” in relation to anything. This is called “being human.” Your personal conclusion doesn’t fit the facts presented in the article: stuff disappears because it is not maintained. Dead links are such an issue that there are businesses who are paid to watch out for dead links in websites and determine whether the target is actually gone, has moved to a new URL or is just temporarily missing. Businesses like “Link Alarm” aren’t politics, they are just dealing with reality.

Apocryphon 6y ago

I suppose one political angle is that long before the current Age of FAANG, corporate consolidation of the web during the '00s led to the dilution of websites and their downfall- see News Corp. buying MySpace, Yahoo! buying GeoCities, even the AOL-Time Warner merger. On the other hand, that's a pretty simplistic reading of the situation of web sites that were all behind the times in their own ways, and you can also point out to non-consolidated websites whose financial downfalls destroyed a lot of internet history- Photobucket and ImageShack paywalling everything and the demise of a ton of other image-hosting services also happened as well.

mlok 6y ago

https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ This search engine remove the top million top websites from its results

nickjj 6y ago

> My personal conclusion is that Google has been heavily down-scoring content which is more than a couple months old. I think it depends. I have some technical posts that are ~3 years old and they're my most popular posts by orders of magnitude. I'm not an SEO expert but if you're writing about topical things, then that could explain why you might be losing rankings / traffic after a few months.