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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#161

Last night I ended up, for some weird nostalgic reason, installing a Gopher client, just to see if there was anything still around. Amazingly, there's a bunch of blogs (called phlogs in Gopherspace) that people are updating regularly! Pretty amazing!

How did you find these Gopher sites? Is there a Gopher search engine, or is it just a hand-updated list?

Gopher is a great protocol. I never really used it back in its heyday; I'm not sure I knew it existed at the time (I didn't really get "real" Internet access until 1995 or so). I recently discovered it after having similar sentiments as the author of this article concerning the state of the WWW.

After you get your Gopher client set up (lynx in the terminal works great), a good starting point is gopher://sdf.org

There are many active "phlogs" published on SDF.org; there is also an aggregator that tracks some 20-odd phlogs at: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta (though it seems to be down at the time of this posting).

The "Gopherspace" is a refreshing wormhole -- with a surprising amount of present-day activity -- into the Internet of yesteryear. I highly recommend checking it out and perhaps publishing your own content on Gopher if you're tired of the dumpster fire that is the WWW.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#162
post #122

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…

This brought to mind this site which got attention several years ago: https://millionshort.com/about Maybe 5 or 10 years ago. It's a search engine that filters out the top N websites. However I just tried it and it seems to be poorly maintained -- it's crashing on certain queries, and giving me captchas after only a few searches. Some people noticed this problem many years ago, and here is a solution which didn't qui…

Wow, that's really neat! Thanks for sharing that.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#163
post #36

I was a part of the Geocities team in 1998. Part of the reason a large part of the early web no longer exists is that many of these web pages were hosted for free by Geocities. Tragically when they were purchased by Yahoo, Yahoo decided to simply shred the early web, they decided it was not worth it to keep supporting the service and simply hit delete on a huge chunk of the content of the early web.

In fairness, Yahoo ran geocities for an entire decade before shutting it down.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#164
post #90

I miss them, they were a great example of how creative everyone can be, now doing "awesome" things on the internet is so cookie cuttered.

And "welcome to my website it is still under construction please sign my guestbook" isn't cookie cutter?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#165
Try to find more better information on very specific topics, however, and you'll find that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the popular content, making it harder to find the anything else. I don't think that's a good thing.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#166
Try to find better information on very specific topics, however, and you'll find that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the bad content, making it harder to find the other stuff. I don't think that's good.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#167
Check out the search engine at http://wiby.me

From their about page:

Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#168
Nowadays, everyone with a basic understanding of search engines easily find almost anything they need 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 optimizing more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the content.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#169
I wrote a little program that does the "follow links and see if I find anything interesting" thing. It takes seed links, pulls all links that don't go back to the same domain, and then chooses 50 and repeats. Then there's another program to find the uncommon sites from everything gathered. Check it out at https://github.com/riley-martine/water_skimmer

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#170
Unfortunately, a large part of the reason the web used to be fun is that there didn't used to be anything like it. The only way we can get that again is by inventing the next world-changing communications technology, not by trying to dig up the old web. It pains me as much as anyone else to say this since I got started on the web back in 1994 and experienced its early magic first-hand.
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