Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this something that could be scripted with some foo to be a basic search engine in itself? Anyone know if something like this exists?
What I have wanted to do for some time, well over a decade, is to create a search engine that just searches page titles. Not as a substitute for any other search engine but as a high throughput discovery tool to screen for websites which can then be explored and searched further. There are, e.g., search engines that search for strings in the page source, e.g., to detect use of certain Javascript files. These are slow…
Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
271–280 of 286 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#272Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#273You explored it. That's it. Turns out there's less of it than you imagined. There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more because you've seen similar things already. I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (o…
I think this is half the explanation. The other half is that people stopped making cool internet things just out of the passion and craft of it. Now everything on the internet is "content," a hyper optimized form of human intellectual output that is devoid of art, minimal on information, excreted instead of created, measured to the lowest common denominator, monetized yet worthless, just enough bait on the hook for t…
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#274I miss k10k[1]. They had always something new to explore. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030207162038/http://www.k10k.n...
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#275Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#276It's because your interface to the internet is not browsing-based. Back when we used things like the Yahoo directory as our main method of searching, we'd travel down different categories, finding unexpected websites as we went. That felt like exploring, because you were making choices about which direction to go, and that would determine what you saw next. With a search engine, you tell the search engine what you wa…
One thing that can enhance browsing is to look up key terms and concepts if they are not hyperlinked.
I recently donated to Wikipedia. They deserve it.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm old enough that I had to hand-write all my web code when I started in the business, and I still do. Primarily because I never liked templates or wanted to learn how to tweak them - that's learning someone else's framework and being at their mercy. As it turns out, writing your own code is a lost skill and the companies and individuals who do need that service are willing to pay an arm and a leg for it. So I can c…
> As it turns out, writing your own code is a lost skill and the companies and individuals who do need that service are willing to pay an arm and a leg for it. Where do you find companies and individuals willing to pay $200/hr for basic, non-templated web code? (Or is it one of those things where they find you...)
For really "basic" stuff, like doing a static website with a couple forms for an auto shop or something, I usually advise people to just go with a template solution. But one of the advantages of being solo is I've built up a really extensive set of tooling over the years, including my own lightweight CMS that's applicable for certain things where non-technical users just want to occasionally edit and preview content in-page. So that's deployed in some places.
Really, the $200/hr rate is to keep away cheap clients. It kind of obscures the fact that I work fast, so, if a client knows exactly what they want from a static website with a couple forms, I might knock it out in 8-12 hours, plus another 16 from the graphic designer I work with (who's billed separately at $100/hr). This isn't unreasonable for, say, a lawyer or a mechanic who wants something high-quality that doesn't look like every other site. We're a one-stop shop, so we'll also do logos, print pieces, etc. at the design rate. I also handle all the hosting, server management and domain registration for smaller clients (everything except email servers) and just send them a retainer bill for $400/year that includes all that plus 2 hours of support. On the higher end, there are a few companies whose stores and business apps I wrote way back who just need to keep making upgrades and changes, so I'm usually booked out for six months and rarely take new clients anymore.
I think the pricing works for a couple reasons. Initially I did it because I was tired of clients changing their minds or requesting endless unnecessary features that I felt cluttered up what should have been clean, easily navigated UIs. This was very prevalent in the Flash age when everyone wanted unnecessary animations and crazy splash pages. I would give an estimate for the number of hours involved at the beginning of a job based on the original features they requested, and anything beyond that I would start charging the hourly rate; it dissuaded them from waffling on "let's try this" and ruining their own websites. Over time I came to realize that a certain group of people like to show off a little and say they paid extra for something unique or higher-quality, or from "this guy who's the best" - and the people they bragged to would want to show that they weren't cheap either. Whereas I'm a guy who's like, "guess how cheap I got these boots", CEOs tend to be more of the "look what I can afford" type. And I'm not above tapping into that psychology. An additional benefit turned out to be that as a result of paying more, they actually trusted me more to make good calls about UI/UX, because you trust someone more who comes personally recommended, but also because professionals trust someone more who charges in or above their own income range. I realized this when I found out my in-laws' tiny mortgage office was paying a database specialist $500/hr - back in 2006 - to come in once in awhile and work on their Salesforce installation, back when I was only charging $50/hr for full stack web work. To them, she walked on water. I started raising my rate annually.
One lesson I learned from the art and design world, before I even got into coding, was that under-pricing your own work is the kiss of death. Keeping my rates high enough to drive some clients away has given me more free time and let me shape my career in a direction I actually want.
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#278Long before MS deprecated "the blue E", you could still "walk the web" with Yahoo Categories. Yahoo shut down dir.yahoo.com years ago: https://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370 I don't know if there are any replacements for it. Most of the archive.org links are still working and the directory is still worth exploring: https://web.archive.org/web/20140927131133/https://dir.yahoo...
>I don't know if there are any replacements for it. There was DMOZ (which Google has previously used to seed it's crawl) and now there's https://www.curlie.org/
Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#279Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?
#280This website has helped me find new and hidden gems. It was posted to HN last month.