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The issue is that there is a lot of literal trash in form of autogenerated content from bots to search through. You need a ranking of some kind if you want to f

by _piif 3y ago

The issue is that there is a lot of literal trash in form of autogenerated content from bots to search through. You need a ranking of some kind if you want to find anything of relevance which will always be subject to exploitation by others. I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then.

horsawlarway 3y ago
I think this is basically it. The problem is that any automated discovery mechanism is quickly ruined by automated spam/ads created to exploit it. So the most reliable discovery mechanisms are still small communities of real people. But because they're good - they attract more and more people until the quality reverts to the mean, and it's mostly just junk/spam/ads again. Social media companies are extremely prone to cancer - if you will. A large part of long they survive is in how good they are at fighting off the junk created by their own users. In a way - the internet (or at least the DNS system) is just the top level social media company that made absolutely no attempt to fight the cancer. It's value died a long time ago, and it's mostly a wasteland of junk now.
bsder 3y ago
> I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then. It was a problem back then, but we had multiple search engines instead of just Google. If you optimized for Google, you almost certainly de-optimized for the others. Once Google became the defacto monopoly, websites didn't have to worry about this anymore. What people need is a search engine that they can tune to themselves. Unfortunately, the net is really big now, and it's not clear how you can index it in a cost-effective manner.
bdw5204 3y ago
In the early web (circa 2000 and earlier), search engines were awful so most people used human-curated directories (Yahoo, DMOZ), web rings or links pages to find new web sites to visit. The web rings were organized groups of web sites that linked to each other in a circular fashion and it was normal for every web site to have a links page that linked to similar sites much like you'd still see on a college professor's personal site. I'm familiar with this because I heavily used the web of that era as a pre-teen. Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.

by _piif 3y ago

horsawlarway 3y ago

I think this is basically it. The problem is that any automated discovery mechanism is quickly ruined by automated spam/ads created to exploit it. So the most reliable discovery mechanisms are still small communities of real people. But because they're good - they attract more and more people until the quality reverts to the mean, and it's mostly just junk/spam/ads again. Social media companies are extremely prone to cancer - if you will. A large part of long they survive is in how good they are at fighting off the junk created by their own users. In a way - the internet (or at least the DNS system) is just the top level social media company that made absolutely no attempt to fight the cancer. It's value died a long time ago, and it's mostly a wasteland of junk now.

bsder 3y ago

> I don't know how much of a problem this used to be back then. It was a problem back then, but we had multiple search engines instead of just Google. If you optimized for Google, you almost certainly de-optimized for the others. Once Google became the defacto monopoly, websites didn't have to worry about this anymore. What people need is a search engine that they can tune to themselves. Unfortunately, the net is really big now, and it's not clear how you can index it in a cost-effective manner.

bdw5204 3y ago

In the early web (circa 2000 and earlier), search engines were awful so most people used human-curated directories (Yahoo, DMOZ), web rings or links pages to find new web sites to visit. The web rings were organized groups of web sites that linked to each other in a circular fashion and it was normal for every web site to have a links page that linked to similar sites much like you'd still see on a college professor's personal site. I'm familiar with this because I heavily used the web of that era as a pre-teen. Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.