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Au contraire. Yes, the beauty of the late 90's-early 00's internet was Alta Vista, and then Google, which allowed you to find the parts of the living internet t
by TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
Au contraire. Yes, the beauty of the late 90's-early 00's internet was Alta Vista, and then Google, which allowed you to find the parts of the living internet that were interesting to you. Now, search engine results will almost never serve you up a single-user's web site. They will dutifully shovel you to one of the dozen walled gardens that has become "the internet." The search engines themselves have become the gatekeepers of this dead, corporate internet, and there's no breaking out of it.
- danielvaughn 4y agoIt would actually be lovely to have a search engine that only serves up single-creator or few-creators websites. I'm sure one exists, but I'm not aware of any.
- syeare 4y agoI haven't used it (or their browser Orion, which is allegedly better-performing and more battery-efficient than Safari), but have you tried the "premium" search engine called https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/ ?
- Terretta 4y agoKagi with lenses is tremendous. I recommend it elsewhere in this thread. One should subscribe to it out of support, hope, and to send a signal if nothing else. But it’s actually considerably better on most searches, perhaps similar to a mid-2000s Google, except with mild structure added that isn’t ads. (You can still !g like ddg if you feel you absolutely must.)
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoImagine websites having a captcha, that proofs that they are handcrafted by a person, proofing the time invested, the back and forth. You could filter for that.
- dicknuckle 4y agoAre you a GPT-3?
- fumblebee 4y agoThis actually seems a reasonable enough solution to the bot problem, but doesn’t address the fake content problem. A human can still upload fake stuff.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoNot, if the whole creation process has been documented with a sort of internal blockchain.. From scan sketch, to open canvas, to every single brush, to convert image to upload image. You can fake that too, but the effort would be tremendous
- tspike 4y agohttps://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIs there any real obstacle to building a search engine that primarily shows smaller independent websites? Seems pretty doable.
- shagie 4y agoUnless this is a whitelist, it's a metric which will be gamed. If it is a white list, then why have a search engine rather than an old school curated Yahoo directory?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoSearch engine spam is actually a fairly solvable problem if you aren't in Google's questionable position of also selling the ads that make the spam economically viable. They can do everything except the one thing that would actually hurt the search engine spammers right in the coin purse: Penalize websites for having ads.
- jjoonathan 4y ago> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
- marginalia_nu 4y agoYeah, that one aged well :P
- rightbyte 4y ago> Penalize websites for having ads. Oh ... this is such a good idea. I'm like tempted to try it and see what happens.
- chc 4y agoI don't know about that. If I recall correctly, there was a time when Google was trying to tamp down on pages with excessive advertising, so SEO spammers just switched to making pages that superficially looked like normal informational pages, but the content was all either ad copy or spun text, and all their links went to products they wanted to sell.
- panick21_ 4y agoHow many 'walled gardens' must there be before it simply is a city?
- hinkley 4y agoThe people standing outside don’t give a damn what the people on the walls call it.
- panick21_ 4y agoThey are not walled for those going in. How can we call everything a walled garden when many of them are free to get in and interconnect with each other?
- cma 4y agoYou just have to give up your firstborn at the gates, and buy a paid Boost to be seen by people who clicked something like "notify of all posts."
- JohnFen 4y agoThe price of entry is very steep. Many people are willing to pay. Many are not. It's an exaggeration to say that many walled gardens are free to get into, I think. At least, I don't know of any.
- mayoi 4y agoWho stops people from running their own search engines? As if you cannot look up address range of your own country then crawl your whole country for websites that may be hosted by people living locally. As if you cannot do the same with a foreign country that interests you. Maybe you could even find a list that only shows residential IP's so you're sure to be only finding webservers ran by individuals and not corporations. And if somehow "port scanning" by trying to send a http request to a residential IP is illegal in your dystopian country, you can always start by scraping the site that you're interested in, there will always be at least one more link to another domain somewhere. For large scale servers python is shit, but that doesn't mean that you cannot spend few weekends writing your own python crawler for your needs, which is so easy that you don't need to be a programmer to do it, and if you really care about this at all, a bit of a startup hurdle won't make you immediately disinterested. And if it really does, there's always options like https://yacy.net/ https://yacy.net/ You should see these things more like real life. If you wanted to know more about your own neighbourhood, what better way is there than to go outside and walk around your neighbourhood and see things with your own eyes? Maybe that's just my opinion, but status quo is noone's but your own fault, because I never had this problem.
- HotHotLava 4y agoEven if your neighbor hosts a website for your local football club or whatever, it will almost certainly use some hosting service and not a local machine. The number of websites self-hosted from a residential home must be a tiny, tiny fraction of all "interesting" websites.
- mayoi 4y ago
- raxxorraxor 4y agoContent producers get sucked into walled gardens. Even if it is just an internet discussion, but nobody will ever read your shit on Discord if it is older than a week. IRC had some of the same problems, but only to a degree. So user content is decreasing and corporate and bot farms remain for the open net. You could crawl forums and find deep technical discussions. Not anymore. And if a term was ever part of any news cycles, you get walls of Google selected propaganda.
- mike10921 4y agoCompletely agree. Just a few years back before I was using a password manager with random passwords I googled one of my commonly used passwords. I was able to find leaked databases of passwords etc. The other day I did a similar search and absolutely nada. When I search for technical information 2 out of 3 times I get a website that I must pay to view content. The internet is clearly going in a bad direction and most average joe users are suffering and will likely suffer more in the future.
- jjoonathan 4y agoAgreed, the long tail is disappearing from google. Between datasheets and old cringey fanfic of mine, there are more and more resources that I am aware of that absolutely still exist on the internet, with reasonable robots.txt, but can't be coaxed out of google even with exact snippets.
- Scoundreller 4y agoSome time ago, google seemed to start really favouring corporate content. It used to ensure most searches would have a few blog results, a wiki link, some large corps, some small corps, but that’s fallen apart. I know this for the wrong reasons. I used to publish pages for my bank’s phone numbers because… I’d just publish their phone numbers. While this is kinda a bad idea, now searches will give you 10 links to the bank’s own website and they make it difficult to find a number because they don’t want you to call them.
- hattmall 4y agoI have been trying to find what refrigerant my vehicle uses for 2 days. It is absolutely insane that I can't find anything but spam content.
- sokoloff 4y agoPost-1995 and old enough to be out of warranty? Overwhelmingly R-134a. If you can’t find a sticker (or if that sticker says R-12, it still may have been converted), unscrew the cap on the service port and match it up to the type of port used by each refrigerant.
- lolinder 4y agoYou're talking to the creator of a search engine specifically designed to turn up the single-user portion of the internet. I would venture a guess that they know better than anyone what's out there in the non-Googleable internet.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y agoNo one is denying that bespoke web sites exist. I still run one myself, almost out of sheer stubbornness. But nothing hits it except search engines, which never show a result from it.
- lolinder 4y agoYes, Google and the other big, profit-driven engines won't show bespoke websites. search.marginalia.nu doesn't show anything but bespoke. If you want to break out of the dead, corporate internet, that's exactly what the GP built marginalia.nu to do.
- Terretta 4y ago>> The Dead Internet is a mirage caused by the unreasonable effectiveness of digital marketing… > On the contrary… The search engines themselves… With you 100% except for the opening rebuttal. What do you think /caused/ search engines to devolve like this if not digital marketing? I pay cash for kagi.com, and recommend it. Engineers should try their “lens” approach. I’d pay more for trusted curated lenses, and hope that’s in their model. The site above could offer a curated list of valid sites, and then I’d find them in the one engine too. (See Similar Projects on Marginalia’s About page.) I also pay for Neeva, but they’re clearly trying to have their advertorial cake and eat it too. Still, it’s a better resource than Google when seeking an actual product. I worry that solving digital marketing’s ‘unreasonable effectivness’ requires more than just ability to subscribe to content without ads, it should be possible to buy products without marketing budget built into the cost. Lower cost products would outcompete those spending money on ads, so all else being equal, enabling products to compete without marketing budget is the only solution I see. I don’t think a Neeva solves this by itself, though it’s likely a necessary component.
- skrtskrt 4y agoAlso a big fan & paying customer of kagi.com - the only setting adjustment I've made so far is pushing docs.rs up in search results, so I get that instead of crates.io when looking up Rust stuff. To me it falls into the category of IntelliJ products, where it makes my life and productivity so much better that the price is a no-brainer
- disqard 4y agoAnother vote of support for kagi.com -- it's well worth the payment. Our (collective) disinclination towards paying for things on the Internet is what has led to the "everything must be monetized via ads" local maxima we're now stuck in. If you care enough about this state of affairs, and can afford to do so (most people here can), then please consider paying for parts of the Internet that are important to you, like a search engine.
- Nullabillity 4y agoPaid search engines sound like they'd make filter bubbles even worse though, no?
- beezle 4y agoI use millionshort.com for searches that I know will be useless on Google or similar. It lets you remove "top" sites and also e-commerce to the extent it is able to identify them. Though it generally works OK, sometimes it has gotten wonky and gone into a captcha loop.
- Terretta 4y agoworks well for common things lots of people write about, but uncommon search combos come up empty or full of underperforming listicle pages I wish dumping the top million also dumped anything with “Top N” in the title of the page…
- april_22 4y agoI have been getting great results with you.com and am downranking all the sites I don't find value in. Searching for shopping related queries has been a blast in comparison to Google. https://you.com/search?q=best+laptops https://you.com/search?q=best+laptops https://www.google.com/search?q=best%20laptops https://www.google.com/search?q=best%20laptops
- unity1001 4y ago"Brands is how you sort out the mess" - Eric Schmidt, circa sometime 2010s.
- rikroots 4y agoI just Googled my name and the search engine returned a good long list of pages featuring my work in various places[1]. Of course it does help to have a fairly unique name; others may struggle to find themselves featured on the first page of results when they Google their name. [1] For instance, this link - which I discovered just ten minutes ago. I know for a fact that I have never submitted poetry to the Porkopolis website (motto: "Considering the pig, a single-minded bestiary") but it's always a pleasure to discover other people putting my words to good use! - http://www.porkopolis.org/pig_poet/rik-roots/ http://www.porkopolis.org/pig_poet/rik-roots/
- TheRealDunkirk 4y agoI also can easily Google my name. There are only 3 of us, and one of them is my deceased uncle. It doesn’t change the fact that I probably haven’t had any organic traffic to my personal web site of 28 years for a long, long time.
- BirAdam 4y agoThis is why I use Brave Search now. It isn’t perfect, but it gets more relevant results than do other search engines.