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I also had this experience. However, I now feel all search engines are returning worse results. Very rarely can I find anything meaningful outside of major cont
by contingencies 6y ago
I also had this experience. However, I now feel all search engines are returning worse results. Very rarely can I find anything meaningful outside of major content providers. Everywhere my results are filtered through a local government lens. In many ways it feels like search on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WeChat, closed appstores, etc. have become the new defacto content aggregation mechanisms, and those are tending toward feeds and curated content rather than requiring active search. The best and most meaningful results on most actual search engine results pages are Wikipedia excepts, or trivial widgets (currency or unit conversion results, weather forecasts, etc.). I don't have any objective measures and am unlikely to be a representative sample but I feel I am searching less, my browser has become a URL-bar based memory system, the traditional 'home page' notion has been replaced by a Firefox auto-curated most-frequent-sites list, and I use traditional search engines more like a command line than a library index. OTOH we now have Library Genesis which is brilliant.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoIrrespective of its legal status, LG is proof one does not need 75,000 employees, nor any perceived "brilliance", to provide a world-class, non-commercial information retrieval service. It can hold its own next to many university libraries' remote access facilities and it puts Google Scholar to shame. It is command-line friendly and offers bulk data. Unlike Google, LG does not try to guess what the user is searching for and answer questions. One encourages traditional learning, the other is incessantly trying surveil its users in the name of selling online ad services to third parties.
- ssvss 6y agodoes libgen provide full text search. I thought it only provided title/author search.