5 ms·

The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.

by d--b 3y ago

gspencley 3y ago
Can we find shit now? I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens. I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr.... I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results. The Web is dead.
- krapp 3y ago
  I find shit all the time. Google still works fine for me. I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    I search for somewhat obscure and highly specific things. There are queries which used to reliably return the results I was looking for. Over the past several years these queries no longer work. It feels like the search engine used to accept whatever I typed and used that to query. The results had to be a good match for all the words in my query. This made it very easy to find exactly what I was looking for. Now google feels free to ignore terms from my query or to use synonyms instead of the exact term. The results are now exceptionally broad and no longer are a good match for the specific query I've entered. I now have to use "quotes" "around" "every" "single" "term" or go several pages deep to find the page I want.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    Because they remember the past far more fondly than it was and converge the utility they get from the current day with the ideals of back then. The reality is there is far more creative and well produced content on the web and closed platforms today than there ever was in any other point in time. And if you can't find it fast enough, AI can generate direct, customized answers.
    - Gud 3y ago
      No, it is not us "remembering the past far more fondly". Today Google search results yield the same crap without fail. For example, a search for "how do I repair widget X" will inevitable take me to a garbage SEO site following the same patterns. The internet is less useful today than it was 10 years ago. Probably it peaked 20 years ago, before big money completely took over and ruined the place.
      - tsunamifury 3y ago
        It did not peak 20 years ago. This is laughable rose tinted glasses. Also you can ask almost any LLM model for that type of answer and get it instantly and personalized.
        Vrondi 3y ago
        ...and you will not know if the answer is accurate or where it came from.
        tsunamifury 3y ago
        This is outdated. You can source with many modern public LLM products now. Why is hacker news full of so much outdated thinking?
        MrVandemar 3y ago
        We just don't chug enough kool-aid.
  - valicord 3y ago
    > I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever. And they never give specific examples either.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    Yeah this one perplexes me too. I won't deny that there's a ton of blogspam on Google (or any other search engine), but Google is still the best search out there imo. I certainly don't understand people who say they find ChatGPT to be superior. Like, what? They don't even fill the same role!
  - calgoo 3y ago
    I have been using DDG for the last 5 years and used google the other day after a fresh install, and i find the results are just worse (IMHO). Now, you also learn to write searches in specific ways depending on the search engine. DDG reminds me more of old school search engines (or at least it used to). Again, this is just my experience, there might also be something with google adapting to your search habits if you allow it, but not sure if that exists in google search like it does in YT.
  - rhdunn 3y ago
    Searching e.g. "xq31 curlyarrayconstructor does not use enclosedexpr": 1. In google, I get 9 results, none of which are a reference to the W3C XQuery/XPath issue. This is because google is actually "helpfully" searching for "xq31 curly array constructor does not use enclosed expr" -- telling it to not do that finds the issue, returning two results. 2. In bing, the bug report (bug 29989) is the top result. 3. In DuckDuckGo, it is also the top result. I've had other problems searching google for specific error messages as it decides to remove quoting, tends to show results for space-separated compound identifiers (see the "curly array constructor" in what google searches for by default), does word stemming, and other "helpful" transformations on the search.
    - valicord 3y ago
      "I had to do an extra click on a clearly labeled link" does not equate "search engines are borderline useless"
- deepspace 3y ago
  > Can we find shit now? Absolutely. Like with anything else, you literally get what you pay for. Free search services like Google and DuckDuckgo indeed suck. I pay for Kagi, and have a wonderful search experience. I seldom have trouble finding anything. Once in a while I use someone else's computer and have to use Google. What a jarring, unpleasant experience.
DebtDeflation 3y ago
Yeah, but music would auto-play in the background, random stuff would float across your screen, and your cursor would turn into......something.
- xandrius 3y ago
  I think it's all nostalgia: I remember it and it was mostly crap. What made it super special for me was when I was looking at a site made by someone I knew, and I could learn more about them through what they made.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  My favorite was an ascii 12 hour clock with hour, minute, and second hands rotating about the cursor. Really helped me know exactly what time it was while surfing those Freewebs sites!
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Geocities was mostly a creative experience, more so than something you'd consume. The fun was in participation.
rchaud 3y ago
Geocities wasn't something you discovered via search. It was a directory you could explore, like walking through the streets of a city instead of cabbing it straight to a top-rated restaurant.
- vaylian 3y ago
  And then there were webrings, which allowed one to walk all over many different loosely related websites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.

by d--b 3y ago

The geocities times weren’t THAT cool. We mostly had to go through pages and pages of crap stuff, cause we couldn’t find shit.

gspencley 3y ago

Can we find shit now? I swear search engines are getting borderline useless. And it's not necessarily their fault, it's just very difficult to find search results these days that aren't lists of affiliate links. And in fairness, this is probably less to do with SEO'ers "gaming" the system and more to do with the fact that all of the content we actually cared about just disappeared behind walled gardens. I abandoned Google Search a few years ago because I was tired of it trying to guess what I was "really" trying to search for instead of just matching my keywords. But DuckDuckGo seems to be getting worse in this regard lately too. I will get a bunch of results that are about something I don't care about, identify a keyword that I could easily filter out and add the "-<keyword>" modifier to my search string only to see it have no effect what-so-ever. Grrr.... I also can't believe the amount of search results that take you to a walled garden. Instagram for example. You can't lurk without an account and every single time I've tried to create an account it gets automatically suspended after a few days because their system flags it as a "fake account", whatever that means. It used to mean a bot but I can easily prove that I'm a real human being and yet when I've appealed the suspension it has stuck. So it blows my mind that they rank so highly in the search results despite doing everything they can to prevent people without accounts from even being able to create accounts, let alone browse those results. The Web is dead.

krapp 3y ago
I find shit all the time. Google still works fine for me. I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever.
- akira2501 3y ago
  I search for somewhat obscure and highly specific things. There are queries which used to reliably return the results I was looking for. Over the past several years these queries no longer work. It feels like the search engine used to accept whatever I typed and used that to query. The results had to be a good match for all the words in my query. This made it very easy to find exactly what I was looking for. Now google feels free to ignore terms from my query or to use synonyms instead of the exact term. The results are now exceptionally broad and no longer are a good match for the specific query I've entered. I now have to use "quotes" "around" "every" "single" "term" or go several pages deep to find the page I want.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  Because they remember the past far more fondly than it was and converge the utility they get from the current day with the ideals of back then. The reality is there is far more creative and well produced content on the web and closed platforms today than there ever was in any other point in time. And if you can't find it fast enough, AI can generate direct, customized answers.
  - Gud 3y ago
    No, it is not us "remembering the past far more fondly". Today Google search results yield the same crap without fail. For example, a search for "how do I repair widget X" will inevitable take me to a garbage SEO site following the same patterns. The internet is less useful today than it was 10 years ago. Probably it peaked 20 years ago, before big money completely took over and ruined the place.
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      It did not peak 20 years ago. This is laughable rose tinted glasses. Also you can ask almost any LLM model for that type of answer and get it instantly and personalized.
      - Vrondi 3y ago
        ...and you will not know if the answer is accurate or where it came from.
        tsunamifury 3y ago
        This is outdated. You can source with many modern public LLM products now. Why is hacker news full of so much outdated thinking?
        MrVandemar 3y ago
        We just don't chug enough kool-aid.
- valicord 3y ago
  > I don't know what people on Hacker News are doing that they can never seem to find a single useful result on any search engine, ever. And they never give specific examples either.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  Yeah this one perplexes me too. I won't deny that there's a ton of blogspam on Google (or any other search engine), but Google is still the best search out there imo. I certainly don't understand people who say they find ChatGPT to be superior. Like, what? They don't even fill the same role!
- calgoo 3y ago
  I have been using DDG for the last 5 years and used google the other day after a fresh install, and i find the results are just worse (IMHO). Now, you also learn to write searches in specific ways depending on the search engine. DDG reminds me more of old school search engines (or at least it used to). Again, this is just my experience, there might also be something with google adapting to your search habits if you allow it, but not sure if that exists in google search like it does in YT.
- rhdunn 3y ago
  Searching e.g. "xq31 curlyarrayconstructor does not use enclosedexpr": 1. In google, I get 9 results, none of which are a reference to the W3C XQuery/XPath issue. This is because google is actually "helpfully" searching for "xq31 curly array constructor does not use enclosed expr" -- telling it to not do that finds the issue, returning two results. 2. In bing, the bug report (bug 29989) is the top result. 3. In DuckDuckGo, it is also the top result. I've had other problems searching google for specific error messages as it decides to remove quoting, tends to show results for space-separated compound identifiers (see the "curly array constructor" in what google searches for by default), does word stemming, and other "helpful" transformations on the search.
  - valicord 3y ago
    "I had to do an extra click on a clearly labeled link" does not equate "search engines are borderline useless"
deepspace 3y ago
> Can we find shit now? Absolutely. Like with anything else, you literally get what you pay for. Free search services like Google and DuckDuckgo indeed suck. I pay for Kagi, and have a wonderful search experience. I seldom have trouble finding anything. Once in a while I use someone else's computer and have to use Google. What a jarring, unpleasant experience.

DebtDeflation 3y ago

Yeah, but music would auto-play in the background, random stuff would float across your screen, and your cursor would turn into......something.

xandrius 3y ago
I think it's all nostalgia: I remember it and it was mostly crap. What made it super special for me was when I was looking at a site made by someone I knew, and I could learn more about them through what they made.
SteveNuts 3y ago
My favorite was an ascii 12 hour clock with hour, minute, and second hands rotating about the cursor. Really helped me know exactly what time it was while surfing those Freewebs sites!

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Geocities was mostly a creative experience, more so than something you'd consume. The fun was in participation.

rchaud 3y ago

Geocities wasn't something you discovered via search. It was a directory you could explore, like walking through the streets of a city instead of cabbing it straight to a top-rated restaurant.

vaylian 3y ago
And then there were webrings, which allowed one to walk all over many different loosely related websites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring