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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#151

Post by stefanpie »

rayiner wrote: post #98
userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Google is not great for finding stuff. I’ve complained at length about how bad it is for doing research, but recently I’ve also found it’s totally useless for finding things like reviews of products (unless it’s something like the new iPhone). It’s like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between Google and clickbait SEO crap.

I do research, what are the best resources that you use (if you were referring to academic research)

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#152

Post by Theodores »

jordanb wrote: post #113
userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Alta Vista allowed LexisNexis style querying against the web. It was magical. I only reluctantly switched off of that search engine after they quit indexing the web and their database became uselessly stale. I always hoped that Google would add that functionality. Perhaps as a premium, paid service. But that ended up not being the business model they went with.

This was very powerful and enabled you to do very powerful keyword searches. In some ways a very different way to search. I was using this for some truly deep searches of internet sites with the content being very much from the original web. The original web being what this article is about.

Nowadays if you 'deep stalk' someone or some thing then you will find their social media posts and profile on linked in.

Back then you were far more likely to be finding them on forums or sites they created, even on those 'guest book' pages - remember them?

Alta Vista and the advanced search functionality was useful up until 2003 or so, then they became part of Yahoo! and we all know what happens when that happens. I stopped using it then but also my particular use case had gone, I was doing different work and no longer needed the search results beyond the search results, i.e. where the whole internets is bisected for the match of two or more particular search terms and their negations. Happy times, but you did have to have the skill to search like that, it was more like using the index cards in a library than browsing the shelves, a mini superuser trick we no longer have even in Google 'verbatim' searches.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#154

Post by heydonovan »

rayiner wrote: post #98
userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Google is not great for finding stuff. I’ve complained at length about how bad it is for doing research, but recently I’ve also found it’s totally useless for finding things like reviews of products (unless it’s something like the new iPhone). It’s like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between Google and clickbait SEO crap.

People don't search the same. For example, if I'm looking for something, I rarely use Google. Always Reddit, which will take me to a specific community with a wiki, and discussion. My Girlfriend will type something into Google, without using an Adblocker, and click on the first thing (which is always an ad), and filled with SEO garbage. I'm assuming most people search this way as well, which is why it's so lucrative.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#155

Post by StillBored »

userbinator wrote: post #80
ambrosite wrote: post #30

I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good, but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal. Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything…

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Is that information even there anymore? I've sort of taken for granted that like good API documentation, whole subjects simply don't exist on the web in any depth. Maybe it is strictly a google problem, I definitely noticed a decline in quality when they started to combat link spamming. I guess at this point gaming google (sorry SEO) means that only people with commercial interests show up in the first 20 pages of any given search result. The result of most searches these days is either some reddit or stackoverflow like discussion board after the obligatory first page of links to pages trying to sell you shit.

Assuming that the information even exists, in a way, I think actual human curated links (aka like early yahoo.com) might be a better way to search if you could hire a few dozen people to start building them. I've even went down the thought process of building my own webcrawlers for the explicit purpose of building a personal search engine so that I could kill-file the few dozen sites that tend to show up as the default answers to 99% of google queries.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#157

Post by rayiner »

stefanpie wrote: post #151
rayiner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is not great for finding stuff. I’ve complained at length about how bad it is for doing research, but recently I’ve also found it’s totally useless for finding things like reviews of products (unless it’s something like the new iPhone). It’s like legitimate reviews are a casualty in the war between Google and clickbait SEO crap.

I do research, what are the best resources that you use (if you were referring to academic research)

I do historical research in the context of legal work, and for that Hein Online is pretty good. It’ll have old copies of speeches given in Congress, contemporaneous articles, and that sort of thing. It also has tons of old articles and research papers in the social sciences. ProQuest is indispensible for more modern stuff. If you’ve got a Library of Congress card, many of these resources are free.

A lot of stuff just isn’t online. For one case I needed to look through a bunch of 19th-early 20th century rail and telegraph tariffs. These were generally published in booklets, but they were commercial materials so the Library of Congress doesn’t have many examples. But EBay did!

As a millennial I fall into the trap of thinking if it’s not Google it doesn’t exist. But the traditional methods your librarian taught you are still highly relevant even today.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#158

Post by SpaceManNabs »

StillBored wrote: post #155
userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Is that information even there anymore? I've sort of taken for granted that like good API documentation, whole subjects simply don't exist on the web in any depth. Maybe it is strictly a google problem, I definitely noticed a decline in quality when they started to combat link spamming. I guess at this point gaming google (sorry SEO) means that only people with commercial interests show up in the first 20 pages of an…

I find the same problem with ebooks and other things.

Nowadays, I just use blogs and ebooks to better guide my searches to find the (print) books or academic papers that I need.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#159

Post by astura »

qznc wrote: post #34

They are still out there. Probably even more than ever. You just don't find them because the SEO-sites drain away all traffic. I believe my own site would qualify? http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/

Well it's uncommon to refer to yourself in the third person on the web like that. Makes it seem much more, um, impersonal and sterile I guess.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#160

Post by userbinator »

StillBored wrote: post #155
userbinator wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at a…

Is that information even there anymore? I've sort of taken for granted that like good API documentation, whole subjects simply don't exist on the web in any depth. Maybe it is strictly a google problem, I definitely noticed a decline in quality when they started to combat link spamming. I guess at this point gaming google (sorry SEO) means that only people with commercial interests show up in the first 20 pages of an…

I'm sure that information is still there, but Google just refuses to index or let you know it is there.

It's almost coincidental how the quality of Google's results fell dramatically, shortly after the death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia .

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