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The Return of the 90s Web

mxb.dev

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#91
I’d love to use a search engine that simply didn’t index websites with moderate or excessive amounts of JavaScript, images, and video.

You wouldn’t need AMP because it would load quickly, ads would be minimal, and the text content would probably be forced to be higher quality because it would have to stand on its own.

Does such a thing exist?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: *…

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

Any new google will become the current google because it will be gamed. I agree with the parent poster about hand-curated directories being the key to finding better stuff. It's necessarily much more distributed - because one person can't index everything - and therefore much harder to algorithmically game.

Google has conditioned us into thinking that "an algorithm that automagically separates the wheat from the chaff" is the only way to do things. It worked for them for a while, but the adversarial forces of marketing, spam, malware, etc are very creative and fast-moving, and that's a lot for an algorithm to try to constantly reckon-with, so best case it'll probably stay a stalemate.

But that's not the only way things can be.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#93
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the problem is that if your site becomes popular it will be overrun by SEOs pushing monetized vapid content. This is how people earn money, they aren't going to stop just because you want to return to a time before they ruined the internet.

Results could be better filtered. SEO spam isn't very nuanced, it all reads the same and frequently plagiarized. I wonder if you can crudely use something like turnitin to filter for original content. Maybe you could try and make a model SEO article for your own search engine, just taking your existing SEO results and figuring out which parameters are contributing the most to their ranking, then filtering out results…

If it was that easy, someone would be able to do it.

Instead every algorithmic content delivery platform, from Google to Twitter to Youtube to Facebook, is constantly chasing just to keep from being underwater against the spammers.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#94

I can't wait for server-side rendering to take its place in the sun again. There are many use cases for which a client-side framework like React is eesential. But I feel the vast majority of use cases on the web would be better off with server-side rendering. And... There are issues of ethics here. You are kidding yourself to an extent when you say that you are building a "client-side web app." It is essentially an a…

[deleted]

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#95

What I miss most from the early days of the Internet is the content. It was all created with love. My theory is that the high barrier to entry of online publishing kept all but the most determined people from creating content. As a result, the little content that was out there was usually good. With today's monetized blogs, it is often content for content's sake. People don't try, or they write about topics which the…

> My theory is that the high barrier to entry

I have the same feelings about social media. It used to be that you only had to listen to your stupid Uncle at Thanksgiving. Now he constantly spews his garbage on Facebook

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#96
post #64

I really hope personal blogging becomes popular again!. Speaking of which, I still haven't found a really good alternative to the "horrible" WordPress for blogging. It has: - Integrated API, RSS - Tons of plugins - Accessibility, translations - Easy and powerful editor(Gutenberg) - Comments sections and forms w/ complete ownership and moderation - Easy data imports from multiple platforms. - Users and roles - 100% op…

Have you considered something like Ghost? ghost.org

Ghost looks great and very polished! For me though, it provides much less out of the box (no built-in comments etc). It's also harder to self host and manage and the hosted service costs 30$/month which is extremely pricey for an indie blog. 3rd party ecosystem for wordpress (plugins/themes) is huge. I can easily extend my blog to an e-commerce store, an online community etc.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. There are so many possible viable methods for ranking search results! Particularly now with higher level textual analysis using AI/ML/[buzzword], and perhaps more importan…

> It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings? To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results…

SEO with Google was about gaming PageRank. A lot of work happened in the 00s trying to prevent that, but it requires an army of moderators and others to identify good/bad links and link sources. Is HN a good source? Sure. Are HN comments a good source? Not once spammers realized they could drop links in comments to boost their site's results. How do you tell the difference? Plain PageRank is weak against this, and that's what motivated a lot of changes to the ranking system.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#98

I can't wait for server-side rendering to take its place in the sun again. There are many use cases for which a client-side framework like React is eesential. But I feel the vast majority of use cases on the web would be better off with server-side rendering. And... There are issues of ethics here. You are kidding yourself to an extent when you say that you are building a "client-side web app." It is essentially an a…

I am aggressively pursuing a universal 100% server-side UI framework (not just targeting the web). If AMD has demonstrated anything to me, it's that the server is the place to do as much work as you can. Offloading work to client devices feels like stealing to me at this point. Websites are very abusive with your resources.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#99
One idea I’ve been thinking about building is sort of a hybrid SSR where you make use of server sent events to continually render more on the page based on the users interaction (most obvious would be scroller).

Of course I have yet to investigate how modern browsers render a never ending index.html, how I wouldnsend the client events and correspond them to the existing open original request, how this would scale to multiple hosts behind a load balacer (but maybe that’s getting ahead of my self haha).

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#100

I’d love to use a search engine that simply didn’t index websites with moderate or excessive amounts of JavaScript, images, and video. You wouldn’t need AMP because it would load quickly, ads would be minimal, and the text content would probably be forced to be higher quality because it would have to stand on its own. Does such a thing exist?

It'd be so easy for Google (or others) to add that capability in their search, using the pagespeed insights they're now using to rank. Like, "squirrel -amp cumulative_layout_shift:0 total_blocking_time:0"
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