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The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized". Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbra

by XorNot 5y ago

The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized". Consider that one of the premier features of the Jetbrains IDE is "search everywhere" which will search command help text for you as well and then return the command as a possible result - much easier to describe what you're trying to do and be led to the exact command, then try to understand the mind of the person who did the categorization.

zrm 5y ago
> The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized". I wonder how much of this is still true. Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened. If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.
- chrisfinazzo 5y ago
  I have to wonder if the degrading of search results came solely from SEO dark patterns that do more harm than good, or if Google actively believed that small sites were becoming less relevant as social took off. Objectively, looking at PageRank might convince them that Facebook and Twitter were where people were spending time, but that particular firehose is so big it can - and eventually did - dilute nearly all the other relevant results. Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory.
zozbot234 5y ago
It was the rise of tagging and folksonomies (now known as #hashtags) which made the blogs halfway usable. Because they allow you to search within the archived posts for the sub-topic you're interested in.
- chrisfinazzo 5y ago
  But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to other sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given page was? This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.

by XorNot 5y ago

zrm 5y ago

> The counter point is that the rise of quality search engines has reduced the value of "well organized". I wonder how much of this is still true. Google results from a few years ago were much better than they are now. That's a combination of SEO ruining the results by Google assuming anything not hosted on a megaplatform is suspect and not showing it plus SEO ruining results by still being there in them despite that, but it happened. If someone made a curated list of interesting small sites by category, it would be a lot more useful now than it was before that happened.

chrisfinazzo 5y ago
I have to wonder if the degrading of search results came solely from SEO dark patterns that do more harm than good, or if Google actively believed that small sites were becoming less relevant as social took off. Objectively, looking at PageRank might convince them that Facebook and Twitter were where people were spending time, but that particular firehose is so big it can - and eventually did - dilute nearly all the other relevant results. Pipe dream: If someone wishes hard enough, maybe we can convince the Apollo guys to leave Yahoo alone so it can return to its roots as (surprise!) a directory.

zozbot234 5y ago

It was the rise of tagging and folksonomies (now known as #hashtags) which made the blogs halfway usable. Because they allow you to search within the archived posts for the sub-topic you're interested in.

chrisfinazzo 5y ago
But wasn't the raison d'etre of Google links to other sites, thereby giving some sense of how popular a given page was? This helps individual sites, but says little about why the overall quality of links has nosedived. Who they link to continues to matter, except that now there is so much noise this is very difficult to get right unless you are extremely clever, lucky, or probably both.