26 ms·

The web starts on page four

306 points by cpeterso 5y ago

sharikous 5y ago
I find myself agreeing with the author. We are regressing towards curated bookmarks. I actually changed my settings to show the bookmarks bar (again) in Chrome and Safari. Search engines, especially Google, are not the panacea they were 10 years ago. My optimist side tells me we will have a revival of bookmarks in the mobile browsers too (now they are way too hidden). My pessimist side tells me Google will fight this trend to the user's detriment.
- frouge 5y ago
  Let's go back to the old glory of RSS. I was so frustated to see Facebook/Twitter using the fundamentals of RSS to their advantage whereas everybody should have started to use RSS for the greater good.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    RSS isn't some panacea to the problem. A site needing visits for money is not going to put full content in their feeds. At best you'll get elided content and at worst you'll get only titles and links. You'll also get the same SEO practices where some old content has the date changed to show up as "new". Most CMSes by default don't do a good job generating RSS either. Most of the time a feed is just a grab bag of posts on all topics. I don't know of any that understand inline hash tags for instance. A separate field for adding tags is just more work for an author. As a reader if I'm looking for blog posts on a topic I don't care about Grampa Moshe's goiter. Yet if I put a blog in a category in my reader software that's what I get. In very specific circles with specific topics RSS can be really useful but outside that narrow range it's no better than the shit show we currently have.
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      Podcast make money by putting ads in the middle. Same could work for RSS
  - TheRealNGenius 5y ago
    You're kidding if you think RSS is the glory days. There are reasons why it has fallen out of favor. If it were up to me, I'd kill it and put it out of its misery.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> And when it comes to demands from publishers of PWAs, there is not much about access to hardware or clever new web APIs. The biggest demand was about notifications and making sure people stay in the app or keep coming back to it. I think this is an interesting observation in the context of Apple adding PWA notification support to iOS. It's also the reason I won't be enabling any notifications from Safari once that feature goes live.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  It'd be nice if the feature included a way to disable notifications per site though. I never allow notifications from a website, ever (or any app on my phone), fwiw.
kaetemi 5y ago
The blogroll-style linking culture is still alive in Discord communities. With colorful about pages, and everything. Animated emojis are the new GIFs. Sadly they do not offer much in terms of persistent content.
- jdrc 5y ago
  > Discord communities. You mean the "app" that has no search and requires you to sign up to see anything, then pass some obscure initiation ritual by the mods, then be pestered with various bots. And that app doesn't even make money yet, wait until they decide to become profitable.
  - kaetemi 5y ago
    No-search is the best part. You actually have to talk with people, and get to know them, to discover more communities! Sadly, it's a proprietary space, yes, but still. The difference with "social" networks (and now the bad state of search engines) is that you actually get to be part of a community. As opposed to shouting in a loud bar to compete for likes to get heard better maybe if some algorithm likes you.
    - jagged-chisel 5y ago
      > No-search is the best part. You actually have to talk with people… I tire of answering the same question hundreds of times
      - Aurelius3 5y ago
        What do you mean by no search exactly? I think there is a disconnect between the person you replied to and the person that the person you replied to replied to. Discord has a pretty good search function for messages, attachments, and embeds in servers depending on date, author, etc. As for searching for servers to join they didin't have that before and you had to rely on third party aggregators, now they do, although I have never tried it out as I prefer joining servers who advertise themselves on their own websites individually.
togaen 5y ago
jdrc 5y ago
> I loathe that 90% of image results are pointing to walled gardens that ask me to sign up before seeing it. I really wished search engines would not show me Facebook or Pinterest results unless I am also logged in there. By search engines they mean google. Other search engines (yandex, bing) have pretty good image search.
kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
Lately I have been wondering about that classic book listing web sites from the early days of the WWW, that everybody was making fun about. I also thought it was funny, but now I wish I had such a book. I don't even know how to discover interesting web sites anymore.
nathan_compton 5y ago
Its called the Society of the Spectacle. Here on hackernews we literally call it "Commoditize Your Compliment." The startup ethos produced this web at the behest of capital. Its kind of nuts to see this post discuss all these problems without even mentioning that capitalism, for good or ill, has created them.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  How do you define capitalism? I assume it's not 'people having voluntary economic interactions with one another' because that would seem a little redundant.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership and control of the means of production and their operation for profit."
    - js8 5y ago
      And also based on free market for labor.
    - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
      so if I have a hammer and am using it to build houses when someone pays me, and I refuse to lend out my hammer to everyone who asks, that's capitalism?
      - wbsss4412 5y ago
        > I refuse to lend out my hammer to everyone who asks, that's capitalism Capitalism in this analogy is your ownership of the hammer, not who you are or are not obligated to lend it to. Though it’s not really a great example, a lot of things are missing from this example, such as how you came to have ownership of the hammer, what property rights you are entitled to with the hammer, and why you even need to have ownership of said hammer in the first place. Alternatively, there is some sort of public ownership (as opposed to private, not necessarily implying state ownership) of the supply of hammers, and you are able to obtain a hammer to fit your business needs as needed.
scim-knox-twox 5y ago
O, someone wrote down my thoughts :D Since few years I hate using Internet, with every year I using it less and less.
- frouge 5y ago
  Lucky you!
simula67 5y ago
> Even worse are image results. > The problem is that search engine results – especially on mobile – are not how you find that any longer. I think the biggest story of the web in the last decade is the slow but steady decline of Google. Google has fallen victim to spam. Goodhart's Law wins in the end. Almost every site on Google's front page is there because people have spent a lot of time and money optimizing it for search engine ranking. But just because a page is good at gaming Google's algorithm does not mean it is the most useful anymore. Google put up a good fight, but it seems like they have finally lost. It also seems like the company has lost it's way. I was recently using Yandex mobile browser to browse some Russian sites and it can translate text inside images and now even voice inside videos. Chrome on the other hand often fails to detect other languages and therefore does not translate even text. It feels like even 15 years ago (when I was becoming a Google fanboy, I have since grown out of it) I would have expected Google to get there before some obscure Russian company. I get it, Russian web is smaller than English web and therefore it is probably more useful for Yandex, but Google's revenues are many times that of Yandex, they should ideally be getting there by now.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  You also maybe navigate a larger web with different needs. What knowledge cant be found with appending "wiki" to any keyword, what person cant you find with linkedin, what movie cant you find on a private bt tracker, what news cant you have from reddit ? I think people over estimate what the web was before Google and under estimate how much easier it s been to find anything. Name me one thing you struggled to find on google and Ill probably be able to describe you the nightmare it would have been 20 years ago
  - habibur 5y ago
    > Name me one thing you struggled to find on google Ad less pages. That provide the content without trying to monetize it.
    - Swenrekcah 5y ago
      I don't even mind ads if I get the content. What I get now however is 90% ads and 10% content, and of those 10% about half of that is actually promoted content. Oh and the ads are also spying on me and selling my information to more ads.
MarkusWandel 5y ago
Does the "Page 4" thing refer to the few paragraphs at the end of the article? Because here's the thing. The cool, electic web circa 1996 was maybe X in size. Chances are that kind of web content is still here, possibly even 10X in size. It's just drowned out by 990X more of junk. If the search engines can't filter the good stuff from the junk, you have to go back to the pre-search-engine days. Lists of links, web rings and so on. They never went away. They're as eclectic as ever. Only problem is we've been spoiled by the thought that ALL information is on the web. And a lot of it is buried in the junky, spammy 990X part. I don't like having to watch an ad-riddled Youtube video for a simple thing like where did they hide the last screw you need to remove. But at least the information is there if I need it badly enough. I also don't like to wade through the "sign up for Amazon Prime" dark patterns. But I do like being able to order a gadget for a good price and reasonably soon delivery.
- ozten 5y ago
  I thought it referred to search results, page four. Very few people look at the fourth page of results and the first three pages are the types of pages the rest of the article is about.
  - noselasd 5y ago
    Is this related to the google default of showing 10 results ? I have had it show 100 results by default since .. forever.., , much of the stuff I'm actually interrested are often atleast beyond the top 10-20
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I don't think it's too late to fix this. We can build better search engines, or better yet, tools more suitable tools for discovery. It doesn't have to be big to be useful. Right now the big problem as I see it is that there is great content being created but its audience just isn't finding it. There's so much noise, the signal is almost completely drowned out. Out of largely the same frustration permeating the link, I built search.marginalia.nu alone in less than a single year in my spare time without prior knowledge of search, paying for the hardware out of my own pocket. I don't say that to promote how great I am. The point is specifically that I'm just some guy on the Internet. Just imagine what could be possible if actual resources were put toward finding solutions to this problem.
- kwerk 5y ago
  Whoa. Searching a few random terms you’re hitting your goal of “serendipity” results. Can you share more about the search basics? I’m learning search now
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Don't really know what to say, a lot of the algorithms are snore-inducingly standard. TF-IDF, an approximation of BM-25. Only twist is that I do Personalized PageRank biased toward a secret segment of the internet to promote the right kinds of search results.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Better search is not the issue, it distorts the spirit, google became the focus of attention, now you want to be listed and seen, to monetize too.. before that people spent less time formatting stuff to exist. The word of mouth levels is a different (maybe more fertile) soil.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Yeah I don't think search is actually the solution to the problem of discovery, it was just the first avenue I tried. Although the metadata from a search engine database does open up a lot of options.
benlumen 5y ago
Couldn't agree more. I'm particularly upset that it's turned our journalists into click-farmers who experience no consequences for the damage and division they're causing. That has been a huge, huge blow to our society in my opinion. At least it brought us the likes of Lex Fridman.
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
I remember UX good practice was that the top half (or viewport) is the key for UX design. The info you need should be clear and visible instantly on load. It's funny that now i have a reflex to immediately skip the top half and scroll to the bottom in a vain attempt to find what i'm looking at/for.
- frouge 5y ago
  I've became so used to ignore useless stuff on pages that I sometimes don't even know what I came for originally. The modern web makes me totally mindless.
medstrom 5y ago
Million Short is a solution. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ Good complement for certain popular topics when the default search engine just gives you big blobs of SEO.
amelius 5y ago
I want better tools to isolate myself from the bad parts of the web.
jjbinx007 5y ago
The web is now a user hostile place to be. There are dark patterns, clickbait headlines, taboola churn, autoplaying never ending videos, ads that track you, cover content, distract you and occasionally try to force malware onto you. I pity anyone who's using accessibility tools to help us the web as sites often have a timer before they cover the content with a nag to sign up to their newsletter or they track your mouse and display something else because they don't want you to leave. I recently was inspired by a hacker news article to try using the web without an adblocker. Holy hell. It's almost unusable. I made a video where I recorded this on my PC, I'm going to do the same on my phone. I had no idea it was this bad. In contrast, the BBC website still seems pretty usable because they don't need to run ads (at least when you're accessing from the UK). They do, however, have the utterly ridiculous concept of having autoplay on by default so if you've clicked to watch a video about a current event, if you don't click 'cancel' in 5 seconds they'll load you another video about something else (seemingly at random) when there is no reason to do so at all. The web reminds me of the state of movie and music piracy before Netflix etc. In those days you bought a DVD and were forced to sit through an unskippable FBI warning and in some cases unskippable trailers, whereas if you pirated the movie you got a superior product. You got a copy of the movie that let you watch it on any device, let you make backups and didn't punish you by forcing you to stare at unskippable content. If you were a music pirate then you didn't need to worry about Sony putting malware onto CDs that installed rootkits in your pc. Software pirates didn't need to worry about similar rootkits that made the game run slower than the pirated version or generally buggered up your computer. We've reached this state with the web. I am forced to use an ad blocker for my security and sanity. Most adverts are lies, scams and are too damn distracting. This isn't the vision that Tim Berners-Lee had. Look at this: http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en See how fast it is? See how well it runs on any old device you may have? I'd rather have this than the current web. Surely there's an in between compromise somewhere.
- elefantastisch 5y ago
  But the thing is... there's also a web that isn't like that, but no one has yet built a tool that helps you find it. Like, here's a site that (among other things of interest to fans) chronologically orders Korean historical dramas: https://thetalkingcupboard.com/resources/sageuk-timeline/ https://thetalkingcupboard.com/resources/sageuk-timeline/ No dark patterns, no clickbait, no videos, no ads, just a labor of love by someone with a lot of time on their hands. The problem for search engines is that it's trivially easy to copy this list and put it up some garbage blogspam domain, but even if the content is exactly the same, I want this list, not the copy, because if I find this list, I can explore the rest of the site and find more great stuff. Even a spammer copies the entire site, this is the one I want because this is the one with a real person behind it who will be updating it, engaging with readers, appreciating the traffic they get, etc. It starts to become clear that what I want my web discovery tool to do is less find individual pieces of good content but more find content from good creators. I don't see any way a search engine can ever do this kind of discovery as well as a human curator. The web has changed so much from when Google launched. Google is optimized for finding content about some keyword because there was actually a time where the was a legitimate problem. You searched "flowers" and Google helped you find the places to buy flowers online. You searched "guitar tabs" and Google helped you find where to get them. Google is still really good at this. Other search engines too. So good in fact that it's become almost invisible to us how easy this is compared to how it was in the past. But now instead of buying flowers, I might want to know... where are the communities where professional florists hang out online and talk about their craft? The Google results for that query are pretty much equivalent to a random listing of websites. But I can almost guarantee there is such a community. Is it a subreddit? A facebook group? Some old vbulletin? A mailing list? Or I might want to know... where are the blogs/channels of the top authorities on web accessibility? What are the best craft coffee roasters in Sweden? What are the essential reads on the history of Botswana? Who are the most consistently good travel vloggers in Spanish? Where can I get help with sourdough starter problems? I can 100% guarantee there are people out there that have great answers to all these questions, but they seem unlikely to be solved by search engines any time in the near future. If someone can crack the problem of leveraging genuine, interested-motivated human curation to deliver results without falling victim to abusive, quick-buck-motivated spamming... they could replace search engines.
wonderwonder 5y ago
I hate the new web, especially google news. Its seems to have gone downhill fast the last couple years. So much of what they feed me is based off some random article I clicked on years ago and now they decide that's all I am interested in. Worse all the articles are just clear click farm bait. "This guy clicked on a Marvel movie link, he must love comic books and nothing else..."
newswasboring 5y ago
Is there any way to fight SEO? That seems like a big problem nobody seems to be working on. Or maybe working on but failing. If we can reduce the efficacy of SEO then we can fight spam right? I understand its a feedback loop where once they improve something, someone will figure out how to beat it. But maybe it can be adaptive in some way?
- butler14 5y ago
  You don't think Google is fighting SEO?
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    If it is, its failing miserably. Used to be that if I did a broad search about a concept it would take me to personal blogs and stuff. Now it just takes me to pintrest. It seems like every non technical search I do leads me to pintrest.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  Yes, there are ways. Human curators, network effects, transparency. Anything that is at the mercy of an algorithm will be gamed once they figure the algorithm out.
verisimi 5y ago
Google is not the victim in this. It is probably the prime tool in the presentation of reality. It fulfils the role that the legacy media used to do - ie newspapers. Google wants to intermediate reality for you. A perfect example of that is how it tried to kill rss - first by making a fantastic rss client so that most people used it, only to then to stop the service. This was not due to budgetary considerations, - it was by design! RSS is puts you directly in touch with the content you like - this is a threat to a company such as google and whoever runs them. If you dig deeper, you will see that google has long-standing associations with military intelligence. "Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.[9][10][11][12] Brin and Page were also part of a computer science research team at Stanford University that received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program managed for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) by large intelligence and military contractors." from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google If you look at the CIA's venture capital firm - In-Q-Tel, you will see that they funded google too: "In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel (Why In-Q-Tel require a funding arm at all, is another question you can ponder.) When the Edward Snowden fiasco was running, I also recollect reading about 3-letter agencies having offices in google's offices - no questions asked. TLDR If you think that the 3-letter agencies are about keeping you safe from the world, you have this the wrong way around. They are about managing the people - they cannot allow information to be unrestrained. Google is an essential part of the infrastructure.
- verisimi 5y ago
  Its all very well downvoting me, but say why not take the time to say what is objectionable? Even if you don't like my assertions, I'm providing sources for them! I have to say downvoting without engaging with what info is provided is one of the worst elements of this site. Surely downvoting should be used sparingly. It shouldn't be that just because you are a power user (with 500+ upvotes) who feels discomfort with whatever is being raised, right? Perhaps its hard to justify working at a big tech company, but downvoting would be a rather self-serving ideology, don't you think?
js8 5y ago
It seems that mass media, in reaction to the Internet and facing the increased competition, went with the approach where they increased the frequency and churn of the news articles and content, at the expense of quality. However, this is a very print-centric approach, where you print something and cannot change it afterwards, and maybe throw the old newspaper away that day. I wonder why they cannot adopt a different journalistic paradigm, similar to for example Wikipedia or Wikivoyage, where instead of publishing hundreds of articles about a topic, one a day, they would instead create a sort of curated portals which would be fine-tuned and updated over the longer time periods, focusing on quality of information. The same goes for most online discussions; they are extremely ephemeral and stupid points are argued over and over. It would be nice to summarize the main points in a particular discussion from time to time and then continue. So I think there is plenty of space to innovate like this.
- Kye 5y ago
  This was a big thing in the early days of the blogging boom. I forget who, but one major blogger made a point out of treating posts as living documents that changed as stories developed.
- lanstin 5y ago
  You might enjoy the old wiki, they tgought a lot about this balance between debate and conclusions https://wiki.c2.com/?AllPanaceasBecomePoison https://wiki.c2.com/?AllPanaceasBecomePoison
- bjornklose 5y ago
  Being ephemeral is both a bug and a feature, though. Take a random Discord server, where we try to figure out some details of a DAO in the making. People from other timezones have to hop in and out and are welcomed by a wall of text when they come back. So did the issue from yesterday get resolved already since you were gone? Maybe, but if so, how did that agreement come to fruition? And which part of the above wall of text do we "mark as resolved"? What part to keep, what to formalize as a rule, etc. Those who were "in the room" when the discussion happened now have to find a way to re-tell the story in another ritual (meeting, weekly summary, task, whatnot). Sounds like the work of an editor or journalist to me. But most people would rather add onto, instead of editing or removing only [1]. Like with maintaining legacy software or editing existing wikipedia entries, most prefer to instead just "add some more". But even more important, some people tend to disregard even scientifically proven advice and prefer living through things themselves, no matter how redundant the experience. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-problem-solving-nature/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-prob... (which i found via HN back then)
aabajian 5y ago
I'm sure everyone is used to typing: 'VanVan motorcycle starting issue reddit' 'FJ Cruiser clutch chirp forum' Adding the "reddit" or "forum" tag makes the results way more useful. Is there a way to tell Google to only include forum-like results?
- Kye 5y ago
  Google in a better era would have noticed this and used it to improve results. I don't think Google cares about good results anymore. Just profitable results.
dasneueprogram 5y ago
This led me to pinboard.in, thanks for that.
schwartzworld 5y ago
I think it's somewhat ironic that when I Google quote "how to fold a Shurgard moving crate" this article shows up on page 1 of the results. I agree with the author's conclusion, but the example is a poor one. I would expect the sort of content to come directly from the manufacturer. Is it surprising nobody has blogged about a specific moving crate?
MarkusWandel 5y ago
The other thing is that the Wikipedia alone is more valuable content than probably the whole web of 25 years ago. And aside from their annual donation drive, junk free. And "X wikipedia" where X is the subject still works on Google, with the desired result at least in the first six or so.
lonk11 5y ago
At the end the author talks about curated link collections as a solution - create them using Pinboard.in and consume them via RSS. I think the part that is missing is how to discover the link collections to subscribe to. I'm building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com that merges the collection, the consumption and the discovery: - You add links to content you liked to your "channels". - LinkLonk connects you to RSS feeds and other user channels that posted the content you liked and shows you new content from them. The more content you have in common with a feed/channel - the more weight their new content gets in the "For you" list. You can also share your channel via a public link (example: https://linklonk.com/channels/programming-yUlhkwDXFb https://linklonk.com/channels/programming-yUlhkwDXFb) or an RSS feed (example: https://linklonk.com/api/publicChannels/programming-yUlhkwDXFb/feed https://linklonk.com/api/publicChannels/programming-yUlhkwDX...) .
- randomsilence 5y ago
  This looks very promising. The problem is see is that without an account, it is impossible to submit links. However, unlike reddit or hn, one needs to submit links to get useful content. Thus I would assume that by the 1% rule [1], it is very difficult to retain visitors. Could you offer options for those who don't want to make an account? Maybe you could create some ready-made selections to see good content? Or you could allow to post links in a hidden way to get the algorithm going and you and some moderators approve them later-on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
  - lonk11 5y ago
    Your assumption is correct, user retention is difficult. I've been running LinkLonk for a year now and out of >1000 users that created accounts we have ~9 daily active users on the site and 43 users are getting recommendations by email. But I think this is in part the chicken and egg problem. The more users join the more useful the system should theoretically become. If you don't want to create an account, consider creating a guest account - it does not require any personal information from you. The account is just a number that is issued to you and is stored in your browser cookies. If you don't end up using it - all information associated with your guest account will be deleted after 30 days of inactivity. If you don't want to create a guest account then the best I can do is to show generally popular content - which is what the home page is filled with for brand new users.
hbn 5y ago
Google results are shockingly bad now. For searching documentation or Stackoverflow it can be fine, but for anything else, good luck. I know that blogspam has floated to the top for years, but it seems like it's gotten even worse in the last couple years or so. Googling for random information, or trying to find a good product recommendation returns absolutely useless blogspam results where it seems to be strings of text copy-pasted into giant "articles" that are just lists of questions and answers that I assume was cobbled together by a bot. I dread if Reddit going public ruins the site (well, ruins it more than the redesign did), because currently, appending "reddit" to your query is the only way to get results that seem like they're actually written by a human. edit: oh, and in regards to his bit about web notifications -- I totally agree that they're one of the worst things to happen to the web, and it's the one web standard I'm actually happy Apple refuses to implement in Safari. It's only used maliciously, and it's a horrible UX. The amount of times I've looked at the notification shade of a non-tech-savvy Android user's phone and seen a bunch of ads from random websites, it's obviously not worth it. Users have been so trained to click "ok" and "accept" on the millions of popups that are shoved in their face as they try to navigate the web, it's no wonder they're enabling notifications on every website they enter. Get this stupid popup out of my face so I can see the content!
- fbanon 5y ago
  >For searching documentation or Stackoverflow it can be fine I have to disagree on that one. If you search for some API or error message, 9 out of 10 results will be these malware-ridden autogenerated clones of Stackoverflow. I can't believe Google engineers can't do something about this. They must be using Google to search for this kind of stuff everyday...
  - hbn 5y ago
    Oh god I forgot about the SO scrapers. They seem somewhat recent, I don't remember seeing them not that long ago. They're usually completely broken. Or just made by someone with no sense of UI
pessimizer 5y ago
"Starts" is a important word here. I know it's mentioned in the tail of the article, but if you have a site that's not shit - please, please, please fill it to the brim with links to other sites that aren't shit. Gift me the ability to avoid going back to a search engine for as long as possible.
- godshatter 5y ago
  Sounds like we need to bring back web rings.
mtrovo 5y ago
As much as I agree I think you also have to consider that things change, and what once was something that only nerds and weirdos used now it's the mainstream way of consuming information. Which means that something that for you as the 99% tail is not good anymore doesn't matter for my mom that doesn't even know what you're talking about as the web being different before. It's the digital version of the old "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". That being said I believe a major part of the problem is the asymmetry between consumption and creation of content. If creating content was somehow harder you would find way less auto generated attention grabbing websites.
jll29 5y ago
I share the sentiments. And the first time I got upset about bloat was in 1993 when instead of a <HR> tag, people put a GIF with a line ;-). Some of it, though, is a natural consequence on the commercial potential of the Web being realized. "If you put up an abreuvoir, the pigs will come", to quote the German supreme court (out of context). Perhaps one could design another protocol that is designed so that it cannot be commercially useful. Because we live in an "attention society" (attention = power = money) this means in all likelihood that such a WWW successor would by definition not be able to get as big as the WWW (which is an upside and a downside at once). Decentralized ideas are very appealing, but centralization is used to make the existing Web fast and convenient - this is also something that will have to be addressed somehow (maybe there is a way to have physical centralization but logical distribution and a way so that the two levels - physical and logical - can't see each other).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bwestergard 5y ago
I've been using the "small web" much more in the past few days and loving it. Strongly encourage everyone to install a quality Gemini browser like Amfora, Castor, or Lagrange and check it out! https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
rchaud 5y ago
> We don’t create content for the web and for longevity. We create content to show ads around it. And that is the difference between the artisanal/hobbyist web of the pre-Facebook/Youtube/Blogging Gold Rush era, and what came after it. The web is dominated by businesses that consider content to be a means to an end. Kids' cartoons on TV in the 60s were designed to sell toys and merchandise after all. This isn't just limited to websites that 'review' things with a metric tons of Amazon affiliate links, or gate white papers behind an email signup. Youtube and Instagram went this route years ago. At least YT is still generally good quality. IG feels like a wasteland of influences shilling some product with a discount code that attributes sales to them.
platz 5y ago
> This is about me as the customer, not about you and your monthly active user numbers. Businesses want to retain customers and have repeat customers, not necessarily just active user numbers. Do you think it is not in a businesses interest to do so? > We don’t create content for the web and for longevity. We create content to show ads around it. Not just ads, but regarding social, what is more valuable to people, a library or a mechanism to get attention and influence from people? The broader "rat race" here is how people must earn a living in todays's society > I didn’t have to wait for a certain time to learn about a new movie – I could read up on it any time I wanted. Who created that content and if it was from a professional source, did you benefit from it? "information wants to be free" sure sounds great if you're not the one supplying it. It doesnt sound like the author was a contributor to the free and open web. I'd be interested to hear a perspective from one of the bloggers he referenced who tirelessly produced content and who's blog died in 2010 with nothing to show for it.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  You're supplying information in the form of your opinion on this topic for free. Now imagine that hacker news starts displaying obvious ads here and someone needs the information you freely provided but is frustrated in finding it because of 3 pages of trash results placed above your post. You would have to agree that this scenario would at the very least be frustrating, not only for you but also for the people who want your free content, right?
  - platz 5y ago
    > You're supplying information in the form of your opinion on this topic for free. My "information" here is not "content" like How to fold a Shurgard moving crate or Movie Reviews i.e. produced with intent to inform/educate the general public about specialized topics. My post is simply part of the social web of personal opinions, and he doesn't seem to think twitter/instagram/tiktok are solving his problems. Forums do exist. Hacker news and Reddit does exist. But I think the OP is not satisfied with Reddit and would not be satisfied if we just had a bunch of additional forum sites.
butler14 5y ago
There's a pattern with these threads (aside the rose tinted glasses). A complete lack of examples. And when there is examples, they're absurd. Of course the results are general for a super general search intent keyword. Of course the results are bad for super obscure 0 search volume keywords. I don't think Google's perfect, far from it, but a lot of the criticism in these types of threads is limp and based on unrealistic expectations.
- nappy 5y ago
  Agreed. I'm not sure if you meant rose tinted glasses regarding the internet or search, but it's definitely both. People forget that google results felt amazing because they were so much better than other search... But also forgot how often they weren't great.
- elefantastisch 5y ago
  "Instant noodles" Consider the difference in results between Google and what you might expect if directories rather than search had remained the primary way of finding things on the web. A search for "instant noodles" assumes you either want to buy them, find recipes for them, or read about whether they are healthy. But a directory topic "instant noodles" would find sites about instant noodles. And sure enough, if you hunt through search results, you can find things like https://www.theramenrater.com/ https://www.theramenrater.com/ which definitely fits the bill, but it takes some hunting. It's a "page four" type of result (in reality, it was on page five). So, yes, this is a general topic and you get general results... but that's not how directories worked. A directory listing for "Instant noodles" would never have included Walmart and Amazon searches. It wouldn't have included random news articles on whether or not they're healthy. And in the days of blogrolls and web-rings and such, once you found one site, you usually had a way to get to more human-curated related sites without even returning to the directory. Not denying there's some rose tint here, but there's a big difference in how human-curated topical browsing differs from search.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The most widely used directory DMOZ.org was closed in 2018 or so, simply because AOL were fed up with maintaining its content. Google didn't have much to do with that. In fact, the Google search bot benefits from having high-quality curated links available as much as anyone else does.
matt1982 5y ago
Mentions that lots of links now from search engines take you to walled gardens. Take a peek around the rest of his site and click a link, low and behold its to skillshare, wanting me to sign up :S
- jspash 5y ago
  Would you trust the word of a rancher who doesn't eat his own cattle? - Not Mark Twain
irrational 5y ago
> I challenge you right now to find a tutorial on how to fold a Shurgard moving crate. This whole post is a disguised attempt to get help with this, isn’t it? (I say this after spending 15 minutes trying to find a tutorial ;-)
vmoore 5y ago
I'm not so sure about this article. Yeah the modern web is a commercialized hellscape now, but there are pockets of resistance if you know where to look, and alternative search engines we can leverage to unearth gems. Think Qwant, Mojeek, Marginalia, hell even Tor has plenty of programming blogs/chans & search engines that remind me of the early Internet. The web is still a rabbithole to get lost in. You have to make the web work for you, and try to escape your comfort zone or bubble.
- chriscodepo8 5y ago
  Author here: for sure, but that's not the point. My point is that the initial experience for non-technical people using the web is horrible, and they will never ever get to the places you mention. The promise of the web as a medium that isn't paid for (and I worked in Radio, TV and Newspapers) is not a mainstream thing.
softwaredoug 5y ago
IMO the biggest issue with the web is the lack of a consistent “contract” between content and consumer. Compare a blog to a podcast. A podcast is long form content. You know clearly how a podcast is monetized, and accept the advertising or Patreon or whatever. A blog, OTOH, might literally be malicious to your computer, privacy, and attention. You dont know if it’ll try to hijack your browser or what it might track about you. You don't know if you’ll have a pleasant reading experience or get twenty prompts to signup for a newsletter. Intermittent reinforcement being the strongest kind, we begin to associate the web / blogs with malicious spam that slows down your computer, even if many aren't.
i_am_proteus 5y ago
Why should one expect there to be "good" free content on any platform that permits content for the purposes of advertising? Is it not the natural result that monetized content dominates free content on any platform that permits both? After all, monetized content, because it leads to some sort of revenue for the creator, has an advertising budget, and free content does not. The only way to to avoid such advertising is to not permit it on a given platform, or to require it to be explicitly financed (e.g., a subscription to a digital magazine). The internet, as a platform, has no such rules, and so it is dominated by advertising.
- hombre_fatal 5y ago
  Though blatant, obvious advertising isn’t the only form of advertising. And I’m not so sure that it’s the worst. You’re just pitching a platform that only launders ads through content because you only ban the detectable and perhaps even the most honest ads. It’s just not that easy.
  - i_am_proteus 5y ago
    My implication being that it's impossible to prevent this, rather than attempting to pitch an alternative.
gtsop 5y ago
Food for thought/discussion: I don't see what prevents the author from having the experience they had back in the days. Tcp, http and ipv4 are still standing strong. I am sure there are more than plenty people around who would like to retain the old ways as well.
quiet_cool 5y ago
pinboard, interesting, i guess bookmarking is a step in the right direction, but wouldn't it be better if browsers actually wrote functional bookmark systems and provided standard import/export methods?
rthomas6 5y ago
Does anybody else remember StumbleUpon? I want that again. It was great for finding new content, better than Reddit or anything else.
baxtr 5y ago
> I miss having the web as a resource. As a library of knowledge and a collection of weird and wonderful entertainment and subculture art. This is becoming a meme. Yes, I also think Google results are getting worse. But: The real underlying core reason for this is that the entire society has come online by now. You can't compare the old, elite web to the mainstream web of today. At the end of the day, Google is just a machine optimizing for the masses.
ploppyploppy 5y ago
This has to be some of the worst writing I've ever read
hackshack 5y ago
This is why I moved to the Duck 3-4 years ago. I became tired of clicking past Page 1 of my Google results, all content mills and SEO farms. DuckDuckGo is just a front-end to Bing, though, and as of mid 2021 I've begun seeing more and more low-effort SEOey links in the first page. Google started the trend, but it seems like all major search engines are increasingly disconnecting search results from the actual search terms. I actually find myself using archive.org to search if I need super-specific old-school AltaVista-style results.
1290cc 5y ago
I see this all the time in home decoration and design. We tried to decorate our home and we had an idea what we wanted but it was almost impossible to escape the "Big Furniture" bubble as almost everything we wanted almost always lead back to the same 5 or 6 mediocre major retailers. Visited any of those big sites? Well then Pinterest is going to flood your searches with content that leads back to them. We enlisted a designer and she sent us over 30 incredible online stores that we had specifically been looking for that none of our previous searching lead us to. Most were small independent places and had incredible quality/value and originality. It was exactly like taking the red pill.

306 points by cpeterso 5y ago

I find myself agreeing with the author. We are regressing towards curated bookmarks. I actually changed my settings to show the bookmarks bar (again) in Chrome and Safari. Search engines, especially Google, are not the panacea they were 10 years ago. My optimist side tells me we will have a revival of bookmarks in the mobile browsers too (now they are way too hidden). My pessimist side tells me Google will fight this trend to the user's detriment.

frouge 5y ago
Let's go back to the old glory of RSS. I was so frustated to see Facebook/Twitter using the fundamentals of RSS to their advantage whereas everybody should have started to use RSS for the greater good.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  RSS isn't some panacea to the problem. A site needing visits for money is not going to put full content in their feeds. At best you'll get elided content and at worst you'll get only titles and links. You'll also get the same SEO practices where some old content has the date changed to show up as "new". Most CMSes by default don't do a good job generating RSS either. Most of the time a feed is just a grab bag of posts on all topics. I don't know of any that understand inline hash tags for instance. A separate field for adding tags is just more work for an author. As a reader if I'm looking for blog posts on a topic I don't care about Grampa Moshe's goiter. Yet if I put a blog in a category in my reader software that's what I get. In very specific circles with specific topics RSS can be really useful but outside that narrow range it's no better than the shit show we currently have.
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    Podcast make money by putting ads in the middle. Same could work for RSS
- TheRealNGenius 5y ago
  You're kidding if you think RSS is the glory days. There are reasons why it has fallen out of favor. If it were up to me, I'd kill it and put it out of its misery.

AlexandrB 5y ago

> And when it comes to demands from publishers of PWAs, there is not much about access to hardware or clever new web APIs. The biggest demand was about notifications and making sure people stay in the app or keep coming back to it. I think this is an interesting observation in the context of Apple adding PWA notification support to iOS. It's also the reason I won't be enabling any notifications from Safari once that feature goes live.

withinboredom 5y ago
It'd be nice if the feature included a way to disable notifications per site though. I never allow notifications from a website, ever (or any app on my phone), fwiw.

kaetemi 5y ago

The blogroll-style linking culture is still alive in Discord communities. With colorful about pages, and everything. Animated emojis are the new GIFs. Sadly they do not offer much in terms of persistent content.

jdrc 5y ago
> Discord communities. You mean the "app" that has no search and requires you to sign up to see anything, then pass some obscure initiation ritual by the mods, then be pestered with various bots. And that app doesn't even make money yet, wait until they decide to become profitable.
- kaetemi 5y ago
  No-search is the best part. You actually have to talk with people, and get to know them, to discover more communities! Sadly, it's a proprietary space, yes, but still. The difference with "social" networks (and now the bad state of search engines) is that you actually get to be part of a community. As opposed to shouting in a loud bar to compete for likes to get heard better maybe if some algorithm likes you.
  - jagged-chisel 5y ago
    > No-search is the best part. You actually have to talk with people… I tire of answering the same question hundreds of times
    - Aurelius3 5y ago
      What do you mean by no search exactly? I think there is a disconnect between the person you replied to and the person that the person you replied to replied to. Discord has a pretty good search function for messages, attachments, and embeds in servers depending on date, author, etc. As for searching for servers to join they didin't have that before and you had to rely on third party aggregators, now they do, although I have never tried it out as I prefer joining servers who advertise themselves on their own websites individually.

togaen 5y ago

jdrc 5y ago

> I loathe that 90% of image results are pointing to walled gardens that ask me to sign up before seeing it. I really wished search engines would not show me Facebook or Pinterest results unless I am also logged in there. By search engines they mean google. Other search engines (yandex, bing) have pretty good image search.

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago

Lately I have been wondering about that classic book listing web sites from the early days of the WWW, that everybody was making fun about. I also thought it was funny, but now I wish I had such a book. I don't even know how to discover interesting web sites anymore.

nathan_compton 5y ago

Its called the Society of the Spectacle. Here on hackernews we literally call it "Commoditize Your Compliment." The startup ethos produced this web at the behest of capital. Its kind of nuts to see this post discuss all these problems without even mentioning that capitalism, for good or ill, has created them.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
How do you define capitalism? I assume it's not 'people having voluntary economic interactions with one another' because that would seem a little redundant.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership and control of the means of production and their operation for profit."
  - js8 5y ago
    And also based on free market for labor.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    so if I have a hammer and am using it to build houses when someone pays me, and I refuse to lend out my hammer to everyone who asks, that's capitalism?
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      > I refuse to lend out my hammer to everyone who asks, that's capitalism Capitalism in this analogy is your ownership of the hammer, not who you are or are not obligated to lend it to. Though it’s not really a great example, a lot of things are missing from this example, such as how you came to have ownership of the hammer, what property rights you are entitled to with the hammer, and why you even need to have ownership of said hammer in the first place. Alternatively, there is some sort of public ownership (as opposed to private, not necessarily implying state ownership) of the supply of hammers, and you are able to obtain a hammer to fit your business needs as needed.

scim-knox-twox 5y ago

O, someone wrote down my thoughts :D Since few years I hate using Internet, with every year I using it less and less.

frouge 5y ago
Lucky you!

simula67 5y ago

> Even worse are image results. > The problem is that search engine results – especially on mobile – are not how you find that any longer. I think the biggest story of the web in the last decade is the slow but steady decline of Google. Google has fallen victim to spam. Goodhart's Law wins in the end. Almost every site on Google's front page is there because people have spent a lot of time and money optimizing it for search engine ranking. But just because a page is good at gaming Google's algorithm does not mean it is the most useful anymore. Google put up a good fight, but it seems like they have finally lost. It also seems like the company has lost it's way. I was recently using Yandex mobile browser to browse some Russian sites and it can translate text inside images and now even voice inside videos. Chrome on the other hand often fails to detect other languages and therefore does not translate even text. It feels like even 15 years ago (when I was becoming a Google fanboy, I have since grown out of it) I would have expected Google to get there before some obscure Russian company. I get it, Russian web is smaller than English web and therefore it is probably more useful for Yandex, but Google's revenues are many times that of Yandex, they should ideally be getting there by now.

secondaryacct 5y ago
You also maybe navigate a larger web with different needs. What knowledge cant be found with appending "wiki" to any keyword, what person cant you find with linkedin, what movie cant you find on a private bt tracker, what news cant you have from reddit ? I think people over estimate what the web was before Google and under estimate how much easier it s been to find anything. Name me one thing you struggled to find on google and Ill probably be able to describe you the nightmare it would have been 20 years ago
- habibur 5y ago
  > Name me one thing you struggled to find on google Ad less pages. That provide the content without trying to monetize it.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    I don't even mind ads if I get the content. What I get now however is 90% ads and 10% content, and of those 10% about half of that is actually promoted content. Oh and the ads are also spying on me and selling my information to more ads.

MarkusWandel 5y ago

Does the "Page 4" thing refer to the few paragraphs at the end of the article? Because here's the thing. The cool, electic web circa 1996 was maybe X in size. Chances are that kind of web content is still here, possibly even 10X in size. It's just drowned out by 990X more of junk. If the search engines can't filter the good stuff from the junk, you have to go back to the pre-search-engine days. Lists of links, web rings and so on. They never went away. They're as eclectic as ever. Only problem is we've been spoiled by the thought that ALL information is on the web. And a lot of it is buried in the junky, spammy 990X part. I don't like having to watch an ad-riddled Youtube video for a simple thing like where did they hide the last screw you need to remove. But at least the information is there if I need it badly enough. I also don't like to wade through the "sign up for Amazon Prime" dark patterns. But I do like being able to order a gadget for a good price and reasonably soon delivery.

ozten 5y ago
I thought it referred to search results, page four. Very few people look at the fourth page of results and the first three pages are the types of pages the rest of the article is about.
- noselasd 5y ago
  Is this related to the google default of showing 10 results ? I have had it show 100 results by default since .. forever.., , much of the stuff I'm actually interrested are often atleast beyond the top 10-20

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I don't think it's too late to fix this. We can build better search engines, or better yet, tools more suitable tools for discovery. It doesn't have to be big to be useful. Right now the big problem as I see it is that there is great content being created but its audience just isn't finding it. There's so much noise, the signal is almost completely drowned out. Out of largely the same frustration permeating the link, I built search.marginalia.nu alone in less than a single year in my spare time without prior knowledge of search, paying for the hardware out of my own pocket. I don't say that to promote how great I am. The point is specifically that I'm just some guy on the Internet. Just imagine what could be possible if actual resources were put toward finding solutions to this problem.

kwerk 5y ago
Whoa. Searching a few random terms you’re hitting your goal of “serendipity” results. Can you share more about the search basics? I’m learning search now
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Don't really know what to say, a lot of the algorithms are snore-inducingly standard. TF-IDF, an approximation of BM-25. Only twist is that I do Personalized PageRank biased toward a secret segment of the internet to promote the right kinds of search results.
agumonkey 5y ago
Better search is not the issue, it distorts the spirit, google became the focus of attention, now you want to be listed and seen, to monetize too.. before that people spent less time formatting stuff to exist. The word of mouth levels is a different (maybe more fertile) soil.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Yeah I don't think search is actually the solution to the problem of discovery, it was just the first avenue I tried. Although the metadata from a search engine database does open up a lot of options.

benlumen 5y ago

Couldn't agree more. I'm particularly upset that it's turned our journalists into click-farmers who experience no consequences for the damage and division they're causing. That has been a huge, huge blow to our society in my opinion. At least it brought us the likes of Lex Fridman.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

I remember UX good practice was that the top half (or viewport) is the key for UX design. The info you need should be clear and visible instantly on load. It's funny that now i have a reflex to immediately skip the top half and scroll to the bottom in a vain attempt to find what i'm looking at/for.

frouge 5y ago
I've became so used to ignore useless stuff on pages that I sometimes don't even know what I came for originally. The modern web makes me totally mindless.

medstrom 5y ago

Million Short is a solution. https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ Good complement for certain popular topics when the default search engine just gives you big blobs of SEO.

amelius 5y ago

I want better tools to isolate myself from the bad parts of the web.

jjbinx007 5y ago

The web is now a user hostile place to be. There are dark patterns, clickbait headlines, taboola churn, autoplaying never ending videos, ads that track you, cover content, distract you and occasionally try to force malware onto you. I pity anyone who's using accessibility tools to help us the web as sites often have a timer before they cover the content with a nag to sign up to their newsletter or they track your mouse and display something else because they don't want you to leave. I recently was inspired by a hacker news article to try using the web without an adblocker. Holy hell. It's almost unusable. I made a video where I recorded this on my PC, I'm going to do the same on my phone. I had no idea it was this bad. In contrast, the BBC website still seems pretty usable because they don't need to run ads (at least when you're accessing from the UK). They do, however, have the utterly ridiculous concept of having autoplay on by default so if you've clicked to watch a video about a current event, if you don't click 'cancel' in 5 seconds they'll load you another video about something else (seemingly at random) when there is no reason to do so at all. The web reminds me of the state of movie and music piracy before Netflix etc. In those days you bought a DVD and were forced to sit through an unskippable FBI warning and in some cases unskippable trailers, whereas if you pirated the movie you got a superior product. You got a copy of the movie that let you watch it on any device, let you make backups and didn't punish you by forcing you to stare at unskippable content. If you were a music pirate then you didn't need to worry about Sony putting malware onto CDs that installed rootkits in your pc. Software pirates didn't need to worry about similar rootkits that made the game run slower than the pirated version or generally buggered up your computer. We've reached this state with the web. I am forced to use an ad blocker for my security and sanity. Most adverts are lies, scams and are too damn distracting. This isn't the vision that Tim Berners-Lee had. Look at this: http://lite.cnn.com/en http://lite.cnn.com/en See how fast it is? See how well it runs on any old device you may have? I'd rather have this than the current web. Surely there's an in between compromise somewhere.

elefantastisch 5y ago
But the thing is... there's also a web that isn't like that, but no one has yet built a tool that helps you find it. Like, here's a site that (among other things of interest to fans) chronologically orders Korean historical dramas: https://thetalkingcupboard.com/resources/sageuk-timeline/ https://thetalkingcupboard.com/resources/sageuk-timeline/ No dark patterns, no clickbait, no videos, no ads, just a labor of love by someone with a lot of time on their hands. The problem for search engines is that it's trivially easy to copy this list and put it up some garbage blogspam domain, but even if the content is exactly the same, I want this list, not the copy, because if I find this list, I can explore the rest of the site and find more great stuff. Even a spammer copies the entire site, this is the one I want because this is the one with a real person behind it who will be updating it, engaging with readers, appreciating the traffic they get, etc. It starts to become clear that what I want my web discovery tool to do is less find individual pieces of good content but more find content from good creators. I don't see any way a search engine can ever do this kind of discovery as well as a human curator. The web has changed so much from when Google launched. Google is optimized for finding content about some keyword because there was actually a time where the was a legitimate problem. You searched "flowers" and Google helped you find the places to buy flowers online. You searched "guitar tabs" and Google helped you find where to get them. Google is still really good at this. Other search engines too. So good in fact that it's become almost invisible to us how easy this is compared to how it was in the past. But now instead of buying flowers, I might want to know... where are the communities where professional florists hang out online and talk about their craft? The Google results for that query are pretty much equivalent to a random listing of websites. But I can almost guarantee there is such a community. Is it a subreddit? A facebook group? Some old vbulletin? A mailing list? Or I might want to know... where are the blogs/channels of the top authorities on web accessibility? What are the best craft coffee roasters in Sweden? What are the essential reads on the history of Botswana? Who are the most consistently good travel vloggers in Spanish? Where can I get help with sourdough starter problems? I can 100% guarantee there are people out there that have great answers to all these questions, but they seem unlikely to be solved by search engines any time in the near future. If someone can crack the problem of leveraging genuine, interested-motivated human curation to deliver results without falling victim to abusive, quick-buck-motivated spamming... they could replace search engines.

wonderwonder 5y ago

I hate the new web, especially google news. Its seems to have gone downhill fast the last couple years. So much of what they feed me is based off some random article I clicked on years ago and now they decide that's all I am interested in. Worse all the articles are just clear click farm bait. "This guy clicked on a Marvel movie link, he must love comic books and nothing else..."

newswasboring 5y ago

Is there any way to fight SEO? That seems like a big problem nobody seems to be working on. Or maybe working on but failing. If we can reduce the efficacy of SEO then we can fight spam right? I understand its a feedback loop where once they improve something, someone will figure out how to beat it. But maybe it can be adaptive in some way?

butler14 5y ago
You don't think Google is fighting SEO?
- newswasboring 5y ago
  If it is, its failing miserably. Used to be that if I did a broad search about a concept it would take me to personal blogs and stuff. Now it just takes me to pintrest. It seems like every non technical search I do leads me to pintrest.
foxfluff 5y ago
Yes, there are ways. Human curators, network effects, transparency. Anything that is at the mercy of an algorithm will be gamed once they figure the algorithm out.

verisimi 5y ago

Google is not the victim in this. It is probably the prime tool in the presentation of reality. It fulfils the role that the legacy media used to do - ie newspapers. Google wants to intermediate reality for you. A perfect example of that is how it tried to kill rss - first by making a fantastic rss client so that most people used it, only to then to stop the service. This was not due to budgetary considerations, - it was by design! RSS is puts you directly in touch with the content you like - this is a threat to a company such as google and whoever runs them. If you dig deeper, you will see that google has long-standing associations with military intelligence. "Both Brin and Page were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP's goal was "to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library" and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.[9][10][11][12] Brin and Page were also part of a computer science research team at Stanford University that received funding from Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS), a program managed for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) by large intelligence and military contractors." from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google If you look at the CIA's venture capital firm - In-Q-Tel, you will see that they funded google too: "In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel (Why In-Q-Tel require a funding arm at all, is another question you can ponder.) When the Edward Snowden fiasco was running, I also recollect reading about 3-letter agencies having offices in google's offices - no questions asked. TLDR If you think that the 3-letter agencies are about keeping you safe from the world, you have this the wrong way around. They are about managing the people - they cannot allow information to be unrestrained. Google is an essential part of the infrastructure.

verisimi 5y ago
Its all very well downvoting me, but say why not take the time to say what is objectionable? Even if you don't like my assertions, I'm providing sources for them! I have to say downvoting without engaging with what info is provided is one of the worst elements of this site. Surely downvoting should be used sparingly. It shouldn't be that just because you are a power user (with 500+ upvotes) who feels discomfort with whatever is being raised, right? Perhaps its hard to justify working at a big tech company, but downvoting would be a rather self-serving ideology, don't you think?

js8 5y ago

It seems that mass media, in reaction to the Internet and facing the increased competition, went with the approach where they increased the frequency and churn of the news articles and content, at the expense of quality. However, this is a very print-centric approach, where you print something and cannot change it afterwards, and maybe throw the old newspaper away that day. I wonder why they cannot adopt a different journalistic paradigm, similar to for example Wikipedia or Wikivoyage, where instead of publishing hundreds of articles about a topic, one a day, they would instead create a sort of curated portals which would be fine-tuned and updated over the longer time periods, focusing on quality of information. The same goes for most online discussions; they are extremely ephemeral and stupid points are argued over and over. It would be nice to summarize the main points in a particular discussion from time to time and then continue. So I think there is plenty of space to innovate like this.

Kye 5y ago
This was a big thing in the early days of the blogging boom. I forget who, but one major blogger made a point out of treating posts as living documents that changed as stories developed.
lanstin 5y ago
You might enjoy the old wiki, they tgought a lot about this balance between debate and conclusions https://wiki.c2.com/?AllPanaceasBecomePoison https://wiki.c2.com/?AllPanaceasBecomePoison
bjornklose 5y ago
Being ephemeral is both a bug and a feature, though. Take a random Discord server, where we try to figure out some details of a DAO in the making. People from other timezones have to hop in and out and are welcomed by a wall of text when they come back. So did the issue from yesterday get resolved already since you were gone? Maybe, but if so, how did that agreement come to fruition? And which part of the above wall of text do we "mark as resolved"? What part to keep, what to formalize as a rule, etc. Those who were "in the room" when the discussion happened now have to find a way to re-tell the story in another ritual (meeting, weekly summary, task, whatnot). Sounds like the work of an editor or journalist to me. But most people would rather add onto, instead of editing or removing only [1]. Like with maintaining legacy software or editing existing wikipedia entries, most prefer to instead just "add some more". But even more important, some people tend to disregard even scientifically proven advice and prefer living through things themselves, no matter how redundant the experience. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-problem-solving-nature/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-prob... (which i found via HN back then)

aabajian 5y ago

I'm sure everyone is used to typing: 'VanVan motorcycle starting issue reddit' 'FJ Cruiser clutch chirp forum' Adding the "reddit" or "forum" tag makes the results way more useful. Is there a way to tell Google to only include forum-like results?

Kye 5y ago
Google in a better era would have noticed this and used it to improve results. I don't think Google cares about good results anymore. Just profitable results.

dasneueprogram 5y ago

This led me to pinboard.in, thanks for that.

schwartzworld 5y ago

I think it's somewhat ironic that when I Google quote "how to fold a Shurgard moving crate" this article shows up on page 1 of the results. I agree with the author's conclusion, but the example is a poor one. I would expect the sort of content to come directly from the manufacturer. Is it surprising nobody has blogged about a specific moving crate?

MarkusWandel 5y ago

The other thing is that the Wikipedia alone is more valuable content than probably the whole web of 25 years ago. And aside from their annual donation drive, junk free. And "X wikipedia" where X is the subject still works on Google, with the desired result at least in the first six or so.

lonk11 5y ago

At the end the author talks about curated link collections as a solution - create them using Pinboard.in and consume them via RSS. I think the part that is missing is how to discover the link collections to subscribe to. I'm building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com that merges the collection, the consumption and the discovery: - You add links to content you liked to your "channels". - LinkLonk connects you to RSS feeds and other user channels that posted the content you liked and shows you new content from them. The more content you have in common with a feed/channel - the more weight their new content gets in the "For you" list. You can also share your channel via a public link (example: https://linklonk.com/channels/programming-yUlhkwDXFb https://linklonk.com/channels/programming-yUlhkwDXFb) or an RSS feed (example: https://linklonk.com/api/publicChannels/programming-yUlhkwDXFb/feed https://linklonk.com/api/publicChannels/programming-yUlhkwDX...) .

randomsilence 5y ago
This looks very promising. The problem is see is that without an account, it is impossible to submit links. However, unlike reddit or hn, one needs to submit links to get useful content. Thus I would assume that by the 1% rule [1], it is very difficult to retain visitors. Could you offer options for those who don't want to make an account? Maybe you could create some ready-made selections to see good content? Or you could allow to post links in a hidden way to get the algorithm going and you and some moderators approve them later-on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- lonk11 5y ago
  Your assumption is correct, user retention is difficult. I've been running LinkLonk for a year now and out of >1000 users that created accounts we have ~9 daily active users on the site and 43 users are getting recommendations by email. But I think this is in part the chicken and egg problem. The more users join the more useful the system should theoretically become. If you don't want to create an account, consider creating a guest account - it does not require any personal information from you. The account is just a number that is issued to you and is stored in your browser cookies. If you don't end up using it - all information associated with your guest account will be deleted after 30 days of inactivity. If you don't want to create a guest account then the best I can do is to show generally popular content - which is what the home page is filled with for brand new users.

hbn 5y ago

Google results are shockingly bad now. For searching documentation or Stackoverflow it can be fine, but for anything else, good luck. I know that blogspam has floated to the top for years, but it seems like it's gotten even worse in the last couple years or so. Googling for random information, or trying to find a good product recommendation returns absolutely useless blogspam results where it seems to be strings of text copy-pasted into giant "articles" that are just lists of questions and answers that I assume was cobbled together by a bot. I dread if Reddit going public ruins the site (well, ruins it more than the redesign did), because currently, appending "reddit" to your query is the only way to get results that seem like they're actually written by a human. edit: oh, and in regards to his bit about web notifications -- I totally agree that they're one of the worst things to happen to the web, and it's the one web standard I'm actually happy Apple refuses to implement in Safari. It's only used maliciously, and it's a horrible UX. The amount of times I've looked at the notification shade of a non-tech-savvy Android user's phone and seen a bunch of ads from random websites, it's obviously not worth it. Users have been so trained to click "ok" and "accept" on the millions of popups that are shoved in their face as they try to navigate the web, it's no wonder they're enabling notifications on every website they enter. Get this stupid popup out of my face so I can see the content!

fbanon 5y ago
>For searching documentation or Stackoverflow it can be fine I have to disagree on that one. If you search for some API or error message, 9 out of 10 results will be these malware-ridden autogenerated clones of Stackoverflow. I can't believe Google engineers can't do something about this. They must be using Google to search for this kind of stuff everyday...
- hbn 5y ago
  Oh god I forgot about the SO scrapers. They seem somewhat recent, I don't remember seeing them not that long ago. They're usually completely broken. Or just made by someone with no sense of UI

pessimizer 5y ago

"Starts" is a important word here. I know it's mentioned in the tail of the article, but if you have a site that's not shit - please, please, please fill it to the brim with links to other sites that aren't shit. Gift me the ability to avoid going back to a search engine for as long as possible.

godshatter 5y ago
Sounds like we need to bring back web rings.

mtrovo 5y ago

As much as I agree I think you also have to consider that things change, and what once was something that only nerds and weirdos used now it's the mainstream way of consuming information. Which means that something that for you as the 99% tail is not good anymore doesn't matter for my mom that doesn't even know what you're talking about as the web being different before. It's the digital version of the old "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". That being said I believe a major part of the problem is the asymmetry between consumption and creation of content. If creating content was somehow harder you would find way less auto generated attention grabbing websites.

jll29 5y ago

I share the sentiments. And the first time I got upset about bloat was in 1993 when instead of a <HR> tag, people put a GIF with a line ;-). Some of it, though, is a natural consequence on the commercial potential of the Web being realized. "If you put up an abreuvoir, the pigs will come", to quote the German supreme court (out of context). Perhaps one could design another protocol that is designed so that it cannot be commercially useful. Because we live in an "attention society" (attention = power = money) this means in all likelihood that such a WWW successor would by definition not be able to get as big as the WWW (which is an upside and a downside at once). Decentralized ideas are very appealing, but centralization is used to make the existing Web fast and convenient - this is also something that will have to be addressed somehow (maybe there is a way to have physical centralization but logical distribution and a way so that the two levels - physical and logical - can't see each other).

deleted 5y ago
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bwestergard 5y ago

I've been using the "small web" much more in the past few days and loving it. Strongly encourage everyone to install a quality Gemini browser like Amfora, Castor, or Lagrange and check it out! https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

rchaud 5y ago

> We don’t create content for the web and for longevity. We create content to show ads around it. And that is the difference between the artisanal/hobbyist web of the pre-Facebook/Youtube/Blogging Gold Rush era, and what came after it. The web is dominated by businesses that consider content to be a means to an end. Kids' cartoons on TV in the 60s were designed to sell toys and merchandise after all. This isn't just limited to websites that 'review' things with a metric tons of Amazon affiliate links, or gate white papers behind an email signup. Youtube and Instagram went this route years ago. At least YT is still generally good quality. IG feels like a wasteland of influences shilling some product with a discount code that attributes sales to them.

platz 5y ago

> This is about me as the customer, not about you and your monthly active user numbers. Businesses want to retain customers and have repeat customers, not necessarily just active user numbers. Do you think it is not in a businesses interest to do so? > We don’t create content for the web and for longevity. We create content to show ads around it. Not just ads, but regarding social, what is more valuable to people, a library or a mechanism to get attention and influence from people? The broader "rat race" here is how people must earn a living in todays's society > I didn’t have to wait for a certain time to learn about a new movie – I could read up on it any time I wanted. Who created that content and if it was from a professional source, did you benefit from it? "information wants to be free" sure sounds great if you're not the one supplying it. It doesnt sound like the author was a contributor to the free and open web. I'd be interested to hear a perspective from one of the bloggers he referenced who tirelessly produced content and who's blog died in 2010 with nothing to show for it.

BizarroLand 5y ago
You're supplying information in the form of your opinion on this topic for free. Now imagine that hacker news starts displaying obvious ads here and someone needs the information you freely provided but is frustrated in finding it because of 3 pages of trash results placed above your post. You would have to agree that this scenario would at the very least be frustrating, not only for you but also for the people who want your free content, right?
- platz 5y ago
  > You're supplying information in the form of your opinion on this topic for free. My "information" here is not "content" like How to fold a Shurgard moving crate or Movie Reviews i.e. produced with intent to inform/educate the general public about specialized topics. My post is simply part of the social web of personal opinions, and he doesn't seem to think twitter/instagram/tiktok are solving his problems. Forums do exist. Hacker news and Reddit does exist. But I think the OP is not satisfied with Reddit and would not be satisfied if we just had a bunch of additional forum sites.

butler14 5y ago

There's a pattern with these threads (aside the rose tinted glasses). A complete lack of examples. And when there is examples, they're absurd. Of course the results are general for a super general search intent keyword. Of course the results are bad for super obscure 0 search volume keywords. I don't think Google's perfect, far from it, but a lot of the criticism in these types of threads is limp and based on unrealistic expectations.

nappy 5y ago
Agreed. I'm not sure if you meant rose tinted glasses regarding the internet or search, but it's definitely both. People forget that google results felt amazing because they were so much better than other search... But also forgot how often they weren't great.
elefantastisch 5y ago
"Instant noodles" Consider the difference in results between Google and what you might expect if directories rather than search had remained the primary way of finding things on the web. A search for "instant noodles" assumes you either want to buy them, find recipes for them, or read about whether they are healthy. But a directory topic "instant noodles" would find sites about instant noodles. And sure enough, if you hunt through search results, you can find things like https://www.theramenrater.com/ https://www.theramenrater.com/ which definitely fits the bill, but it takes some hunting. It's a "page four" type of result (in reality, it was on page five). So, yes, this is a general topic and you get general results... but that's not how directories worked. A directory listing for "Instant noodles" would never have included Walmart and Amazon searches. It wouldn't have included random news articles on whether or not they're healthy. And in the days of blogrolls and web-rings and such, once you found one site, you usually had a way to get to more human-curated related sites without even returning to the directory. Not denying there's some rose tint here, but there's a big difference in how human-curated topical browsing differs from search.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The most widely used directory DMOZ.org was closed in 2018 or so, simply because AOL were fed up with maintaining its content. Google didn't have much to do with that. In fact, the Google search bot benefits from having high-quality curated links available as much as anyone else does.

matt1982 5y ago

Mentions that lots of links now from search engines take you to walled gardens. Take a peek around the rest of his site and click a link, low and behold its to skillshare, wanting me to sign up :S

jspash 5y ago
Would you trust the word of a rancher who doesn't eat his own cattle? - Not Mark Twain

irrational 5y ago

> I challenge you right now to find a tutorial on how to fold a Shurgard moving crate. This whole post is a disguised attempt to get help with this, isn’t it? (I say this after spending 15 minutes trying to find a tutorial ;-)

vmoore 5y ago

I'm not so sure about this article. Yeah the modern web is a commercialized hellscape now, but there are pockets of resistance if you know where to look, and alternative search engines we can leverage to unearth gems. Think Qwant, Mojeek, Marginalia, hell even Tor has plenty of programming blogs/chans & search engines that remind me of the early Internet. The web is still a rabbithole to get lost in. You have to make the web work for you, and try to escape your comfort zone or bubble.

chriscodepo8 5y ago
Author here: for sure, but that's not the point. My point is that the initial experience for non-technical people using the web is horrible, and they will never ever get to the places you mention. The promise of the web as a medium that isn't paid for (and I worked in Radio, TV and Newspapers) is not a mainstream thing.

softwaredoug 5y ago

IMO the biggest issue with the web is the lack of a consistent “contract” between content and consumer. Compare a blog to a podcast. A podcast is long form content. You know clearly how a podcast is monetized, and accept the advertising or Patreon or whatever. A blog, OTOH, might literally be malicious to your computer, privacy, and attention. You dont know if it’ll try to hijack your browser or what it might track about you. You don't know if you’ll have a pleasant reading experience or get twenty prompts to signup for a newsletter. Intermittent reinforcement being the strongest kind, we begin to associate the web / blogs with malicious spam that slows down your computer, even if many aren't.

i_am_proteus 5y ago

Why should one expect there to be "good" free content on any platform that permits content for the purposes of advertising? Is it not the natural result that monetized content dominates free content on any platform that permits both? After all, monetized content, because it leads to some sort of revenue for the creator, has an advertising budget, and free content does not. The only way to to avoid such advertising is to not permit it on a given platform, or to require it to be explicitly financed (e.g., a subscription to a digital magazine). The internet, as a platform, has no such rules, and so it is dominated by advertising.

hombre_fatal 5y ago
Though blatant, obvious advertising isn’t the only form of advertising. And I’m not so sure that it’s the worst. You’re just pitching a platform that only launders ads through content because you only ban the detectable and perhaps even the most honest ads. It’s just not that easy.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago
  My implication being that it's impossible to prevent this, rather than attempting to pitch an alternative.

gtsop 5y ago

Food for thought/discussion: I don't see what prevents the author from having the experience they had back in the days. Tcp, http and ipv4 are still standing strong. I am sure there are more than plenty people around who would like to retain the old ways as well.

quiet_cool 5y ago

pinboard, interesting, i guess bookmarking is a step in the right direction, but wouldn't it be better if browsers actually wrote functional bookmark systems and provided standard import/export methods?

rthomas6 5y ago

Does anybody else remember StumbleUpon? I want that again. It was great for finding new content, better than Reddit or anything else.

baxtr 5y ago

> I miss having the web as a resource. As a library of knowledge and a collection of weird and wonderful entertainment and subculture art. This is becoming a meme. Yes, I also think Google results are getting worse. But: The real underlying core reason for this is that the entire society has come online by now. You can't compare the old, elite web to the mainstream web of today. At the end of the day, Google is just a machine optimizing for the masses.

ploppyploppy 5y ago

This has to be some of the worst writing I've ever read

hackshack 5y ago

This is why I moved to the Duck 3-4 years ago. I became tired of clicking past Page 1 of my Google results, all content mills and SEO farms. DuckDuckGo is just a front-end to Bing, though, and as of mid 2021 I've begun seeing more and more low-effort SEOey links in the first page. Google started the trend, but it seems like all major search engines are increasingly disconnecting search results from the actual search terms. I actually find myself using archive.org to search if I need super-specific old-school AltaVista-style results.

1290cc 5y ago

I see this all the time in home decoration and design. We tried to decorate our home and we had an idea what we wanted but it was almost impossible to escape the "Big Furniture" bubble as almost everything we wanted almost always lead back to the same 5 or 6 mediocre major retailers. Visited any of those big sites? Well then Pinterest is going to flood your searches with content that leads back to them. We enlisted a designer and she sent us over 30 incredible online stores that we had specifically been looking for that none of our previous searching lead us to. Most were small independent places and had incredible quality/value and originality. It was exactly like taking the red pill.