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> There are no free search engines anymore Search is now worse than it was in 1996, Trust me I was there kids :) What you have now is a pale shadow of a real,

> There are no free search engines anymore Search is now worse than it was in 1996, Trust me I was there kids :) What you have now is a pale shadow of a real, functioning internet. Perhaps the way forwards radically different. If a consortium of independent crawlers could release a massively compressed model periodically, say 12 times per year, then search could move to the client side. Anyone got sensible estimates on what the size of a model could be to give say about 80% of the capability of Google/Bing? I think it would weigh in smaller than 1TB, and with clever differential code you'd only have to download the changes. Isn't it time to move search of the web off the web?

cinntaile 2y ago
Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos and the likes weren't great in 1996, that's why everyone switched to Google in the first place.
superkuh 2y ago
Yep. I remember when I used to be able to search for exact strings and engines would find them! Booleans even worked. It was a magical time for web search from ~1999 to 2015.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Here's something that should be shocking: At universities all around the world you'll sit a course called "Research Methods". It's a bit of statistics, philosophy of science, hypothesis formulation, significance testing, understanding epistemology, quality, quantity, bias..... I've a fairly good overview of it, because I've taught it at least 10 semesters. One of the things baked into every research methods course is search. Sometimes you learn the interfaces to specific tools for searching papers. But most of it is what you describe; boolean operators, regular expressions, sorting and filtering... The students are still told to use Google and that this works with Google. But this information hasn't been useful for almost 5 years now. For 5 years we've been training bachelors, masters and PhD students to go out there and use tools and techniques that are almost completely irrelevant. The primary official tool at the foundation of all academic research is broken. Almost no research methods professors I know at any university have though to train students to deal with advertising, spam, AI clutter, disinformation - to deal with the reality of Google as it actually is. For 5 years we've been misleading students. Because we got so hung-up on a monopoly, we've allowed a single corporation to fuck the whole of Western academic research - because year after year I definitely see poorer results. One day I hope the world is able to look back at the colossal cost of BigTech to culture.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
Remember the "I'm feeling lucky" button on google. Their search was so good that you could, for a while at least, count on that button getting to where you wanted to go in a single click.
crisply5706 2y ago
I remember in elementary school around the year 2000, we had a special class where we all learned boolean operators and advanced search functions. Absolutely none of that works on any modern search engine-- except kagi.

cinntaile 2y ago

Altavista, Yahoo, Lycos and the likes weren't great in 1996, that's why everyone switched to Google in the first place.

superkuh 2y ago

Yep. I remember when I used to be able to search for exact strings and engines would find them! Booleans even worked. It was a magical time for web search from ~1999 to 2015.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
Here's something that should be shocking: At universities all around the world you'll sit a course called "Research Methods". It's a bit of statistics, philosophy of science, hypothesis formulation, significance testing, understanding epistemology, quality, quantity, bias..... I've a fairly good overview of it, because I've taught it at least 10 semesters. One of the things baked into every research methods course is search. Sometimes you learn the interfaces to specific tools for searching papers. But most of it is what you describe; boolean operators, regular expressions, sorting and filtering... The students are still told to use Google and that this works with Google. But this information hasn't been useful for almost 5 years now. For 5 years we've been training bachelors, masters and PhD students to go out there and use tools and techniques that are almost completely irrelevant. The primary official tool at the foundation of all academic research is broken. Almost no research methods professors I know at any university have though to train students to deal with advertising, spam, AI clutter, disinformation - to deal with the reality of Google as it actually is. For 5 years we've been misleading students. Because we got so hung-up on a monopoly, we've allowed a single corporation to fuck the whole of Western academic research - because year after year I definitely see poorer results. One day I hope the world is able to look back at the colossal cost of BigTech to culture.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

Remember the "I'm feeling lucky" button on google. Their search was so good that you could, for a while at least, count on that button getting to where you wanted to go in a single click.

crisply5706 2y ago

I remember in elementary school around the year 2000, we had a special class where we all learned boolean operators and advanced search functions. Absolutely none of that works on any modern search engine-- except kagi.