I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result.
I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
Where Have All the Websites Gone?
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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#12I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#13Not only has the content become fairly centralized, many of the sites that you might go to find things like...recipes, or guides, or direction on something...are absolutely littered with ads. It is no trivial task to scroll through these metaphorical garbage cans looking for that one tidbit of information that will help you, mobile especially. And to some degree, I get it. The incentives that got is to today are all…
Tip: ublock origin on PC, vivaldi browser on android. No more ads
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#14I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/
It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#15Isn't this how we classify web "generation"?
* Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard
* Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy, but rely on providers
* Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but are mostly crypto scam currently.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#16Website is great if you want to publish a document. Collect information in one place. Most of the daily stuff is just human communication better served by forums, tweets, images, news, e-mails, chats, tik toks etc. These natively work better in apps or app like sites where the information comes and goes gets lost or never even gets discovered. If we worry about the information siloing up we should build communication…
> It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve.
Interesting take
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#17See also: "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 (1014 points | 6 months ago | 1960 comments)
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#18I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
search.marginalia.nu is one option. Apparently Kagi also has a "Small Web" option. Check out this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821248
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#19I don't see the TikTokization of the world as necessarily bad - it creates a world of fast publishing with first-class tools, no nerd gatekeeping required.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#20I share the author's feelings on the old web, but I think this misses a fundamental point about younger people: they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers. You could blame this on the impatience of youth, but I think it's actually more of a fundamental shift of media formats. Websites-as-default have gone away because browsing the web (i.e. reading stuff on websites) has largely gone away for most people.
It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology. Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading.
It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is the default format, with text-first things like transcripts redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the benefits of text.