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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#251

Post by [deleted] »

dingaling wrote: post #247
hawski wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#252

Post by mayankkaizen »

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)

I was greeted with this message - 'Your access to this site has been limited.'

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#253

Post by zdkl »

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…

> the obvious search engine optimization to look for anything with "tomatoes", "seeds" and "grow" being definitely wrong in this case.

I'm going to side with google for once: you should be doing your search in multiple steps, acquiring more specialised vocabulary as you iterate on your searches. Starting from seed, you'll end up learning that they're fertilised eggs, which you'll use in your second query which'll start digging you into domain-specific academia where younll assimilate enough keywords to have a pretty good idea of what you're looking for in domain-appropriate terms

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#254

Post by ggus »

log_base_login wrote: post #246
hawski wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if you wrap each word in quotes it works the intended way.

eg. "tomato" "seeds" "grow"

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#256

Post by rootw0rm »

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.

same here, it was difficult to move on...

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#257

Post by Lordarminius »

alt2501 wrote: post #245
Lordarminius wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You have a point there.The digital equivalent of 'word of mouth' being the best form of marketing ?

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#258

Post by Kiro »

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…

Just ask that exact question literally as if Google was a human being. That's the key to finding answers to more obscure questions. Use natural language.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#259

Post by delta1 »

gboudrias wrote: post #203
username223 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After blocking all the JavaScript and hiding the position=fixed garbage, that was an interesting article. > So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it. I write a blog, and publish links to posts on Facebook because doing so costs me nothing. I…

> hiding the position=fixed garbage Oh wow, I literally never want this behavior! Do you have a generic trick? "Inspect element" is tedious.

You could use ublock origin (or similar) to "block" the offending elements.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#260

Post by cm2187 »

fiala__ wrote: post #38

> Most websites were written with html, so they were all unique. Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible. I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by ` `s, poorly-laid out flash…

Websites used to do something that completely disappeared: not using javascript to fuck with the behaviour of the browser. You used to be able to scroll down and the page would scroll down. Right click on a link and see your contextual menu. Copy or paste something and it would actually copy and paste. Half of the sites today break the browser in one way or another.
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