I think there's one major root cause of this: Google. Search has two problems, relevancy to a query but then the sorting of results returned. In Google's early

I think there's one major root cause of this: Google. Search has two problems, relevancy to a query but then the sorting of results returned. In Google's early days they emphasized sorting by relevancy/authority related to a query. If you had the foremost site about stunt kites on the web searches for stunt kites would find your site. But then Google started weighing results for recency. If you wrote a textbook worth of prose about stunt kites and published it all in 2000, there was little need to update the content unless amazing new stunt kite technology was introduced. But when Google started weighting for recency, the definitive stunt kite site dominating results in 2000 started dropping down the ranks for no other reason than its pages didn't have recent dates on them. This has led to a bunch of problems. For one it punishes anyone that dared to make a website and then not constantly update it. There's no new seasons of Space Above and Beyond so there's no reason to constantly update a fan site about the show. Second it punishes sites for maintaining a history of content. It's super difficult in Google to search for a topic more than a few years old unless it's got a Wikipedia page. Third it helps bullshit SEO where some old blog post just gets a new timestamp and maybe a few words changed and Google thinks "oh boy brand new content!" This powers combine to form a shit Voltron with an inability to find anything that doesn't abuse the shit out of Google. There used to be some good ways to aid in discoverability before everyone decided XML was icky. If small web search engines actively support such things they could greatly help discoverability. The Friend of a Friend[0] (FOAF) project is a decent solution to this problem. Not only could you define data about yourself but links to other people. It was useful in that it made distinct the difference to a person's homepage and blog which might not be the same. The Sitemap XML spec[1] is useful for providing a map on your own site to the benefit of crawlers. [0] http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ [1] https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html