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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#241

Post by alt2501 »

hawski wrote: post #217
dogcow wrote: post #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 commercia…

I started to work on something like it. With intention of filtering-out ad-serving websites first (thanks to EasyList filtering rules) and heavy-JS second. I'm glad that someone already did something like this. Is there some more information about it? I found that it is done by https://www.wireservice.ca Is there a technical info? I was wondering how big the index is. Because it may be just possible to serve the mult…

I agree! I'd never thought of using tor, but I had very similar ideas about an engine that doesn't index a site if it has ads, etc. I had an idea of using a delayed response in order to lessen the hardware requirements. So a user submits a query, then checks back later for a response. A little bit like a traditional library, haha! Anyway, i'm really glad to hear others are doing similar stuff, I think there is a market. The info is out there, it's just lost in a sea of noise.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#242

Post by jaymzcampbell »

dEnigma wrote: post #117
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…

I recently tried to search for certain Nintendo 64 ROMs because I wanted to try out an emulator. The first couple of results on Google all lead to horrible, ad-infested websites that claimed to offer a download but either kept on redirecting me to more ad-filled sites, or tried to get me to download some sort of "download helper", "media codec" or "PC cleaning software". Then there were the sites with dozens of fake…

I find emuparadise to be decent for ROMs without anything fancy.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#243

Post by bencollier49 »

dogcow wrote: post #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 commercia…

I searched "hamster" and got two results, the first of which was on rectal foreign bodies. Ah, the internet is back to the way it ought to be!

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#244

Post by thirdsun »

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.

Oh, this is so true. Just the other day I was thinking how hard it is to find reviews of non-tech products. I was lloking for information on a new fridge and what I came up with was useless marketing crap and what seemed like affiliate-link collections dressed up as review sites.

The Wirecutter fills this role with in-depth reviews, but their selection is limited and I prefer to have multiple sources when comparing products.

User reviews aren't helpful to me. They are very subjective, may value different attributes of a product and disappointed customers seem to have a greater incentive to broadcast their negative experience. The fact that your fridge broke down isn't necessarily representative of the product.

Another task Google is really bad at, is finding results by lyrics. As a music enthusiast and crate digger I often search for obscure, rare music I hear in sets, mixes and bootleg recordings. If there are vocals it's an obvious attempt to search for the lyrics - mostly without results. On the other hand the song I'm looking for is very likely up on Youtube, which has a surprisingly large selection of rare music uploaded by other collectors. Yet it's impossible to find those uploads by searching for the lyrics featured in them. Google should use its powers to auto-transcribe music on YouTube to lyrics. Sure, there will be a lot of mistakes, but it should be enough to give some results.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#245

Post by alt2501 »

Lordarminius wrote: post #142
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is excellent at giving the appearance of finding everything. The fact that there is an enormous world of which Google remains completely ignorant is a fact of which we seem increasingly unapprised.

Care to expantiate on this ?

Have you never noticed that all the really good sites you 'find' have been because someone posted the link? For example in a comment on HN, or reddit. Or a related link on Wikipedia or the sidebar of a subreddit?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#246

Post by log_base_login »

hawski wrote: post #230
mirkules wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter To emphasize this point, just the other day my 4-year-old asked me "how do seeds inside tomatoes grow?" The answer to such a simple question cannot be found in either DDG or Google because there are literally thousands of sites in this search that helpfully tell you how to grow tomatoes from see…

What Google also loves to do is to show you results with a one term striked-out. The striked-out term happens to filter results the most so it's the most important one. Google decides to serve you more popular (and useless) search results.

They (Google) have a feature built-in to the search engine so that if you put all the terms you want to absolutely see in quotes, for example: "tomato seeds grow", it won't return results without any of those terms.

Note that it will only return results with pages that have those terms in that order.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#247

Post by dingaling »

hawski wrote: post #230
mirkules wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter To emphasize this point, just the other day my 4-year-old asked me "how do seeds inside tomatoes grow?" The answer to such a simple question cannot be found in either DDG or Google because there are literally thousands of sites in this search that helpfully tell you how to grow tomatoes from see…

What Google also loves to do is to show you results with a one term striked-out. The striked-out term happens to filter results the most so it's the most important one. Google decides to serve you more popular (and useless) search results.

There is the Verbatim search option for Google text search, which keeps me sane, but frustratingly there is no equivalent for Google Image search.

Quite often I'll search for an image of, say, a specific aircraft registration and be shown lots of other aeroplanes of the same type. Very clever, Google, but useless.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#248

Post by Nition »

mirkules wrote: post #222
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…

> search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter To emphasize this point, just the other day my 4-year-old asked me "how do seeds inside tomatoes grow?" The answer to such a simple question cannot be found in either DDG or Google because there are literally thousands of sites in this search that helpfully tell you how to grow tomatoes from see…

You might already be doing a lot of this, but using the special operators makes Google a lot more useful. Using quotes around text forces it to be included exactly as written and removes the "struck out words" issue the other comment on your post mentions. 'OR' logic is helpful as well, as is - (e.g. -Word) to exclude words.

The full list of operators is here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?visit_id...

Or there's also advanced search: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890

DuckDuckGo has much the same set of operators.

In terms of how seeds end up inside fruits, Google found me this: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=640

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#249

Post by blt »

JohnBooty wrote: post #121
inetknght wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.

I think the Internet's gotten worse in general (and, specifically, less useful) over the last decade except for one thing: YouTube is insanely useful for learning how to do basic household stuff, minor car repairs, that kind of thing. Insane. Mundane? Yeah, but life is like at least 50% handling mundane shit like that. Maybe 90%. Maybe 95%? Want to know how to repair some brick stairs in front of your house? Sharpen…

Yes. I think Youtube inherited the culture of the old web. Lots of amazing channels about obscure interests. Household repairs but also welding, machining, woodworking, electronics repair, obscure retro tech, distilling, etc.

I guess it forces the presenter's personality into the spotlight a bit more than pure text and images. Probably attracts a slightly different kind of person. But I think the same spirit is there.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#250

Post by greenmana »

Zhenya wrote: post #184
dogcow wrote: post #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 commercia…

My favorite website: http://www.otherhand.org/ And my favorite article on it: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun... (No association)

At first glance that feels like a different kind of spin on Ted the Caver.
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