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Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

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Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#261

Post by mech422 »

joemi wrote: post #243

I miss Google from when it first started getting popular and overtaking Alta Vista and the other search engines. It feels weird to say now, but it truly felt like magic how it provided such better search results than its competitors. I wasn't tied to any one search engine then, and many of my searches were done on multiple search engines, with lots of wading through results to _attempt_ to find relevance. But with Go…

I'm the opposite - I miss alta vista... I miss a search engine with a real _search_ language that gave me the results I actually _asked_ for rather then just randomly picking stuff that matches half the query and stuffing the page with paid results.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#262

Post by aaron-lebo »

yumraj wrote: post #175
geocrasher wrote: post #73

The old slashdot.org The old digg.com Web Rings were amazing, and I think the idea still has merit. Why did everyone stop using them? My ealiest memories were pre-net, on Prodigy and AOL, long before they were 'net connected and could email each other. I learned what connectivity was at 2400 baud. I didn't discover BBS's until much later, around 1993-4,and was at 14.4k at that point. I never really understood fidonet…

old Slashdot had an anti MS and pro Linux bias, but nothing more. It was more free spirited. It was not dominated with startups and VCs and did not go overboard trying to moderate certain kind of discussions. I do love HN, but it is still part of YC and allows some commercial activity and I feel at times goes overboard on flagging certain kind of discussions and comments (I'm not referring to obvious trolling and uns…

HN users can be incredibly incredibly petty at times, which I think you are referring to. I think the software itself is just too easy to abuse and the moderation is too inscrutable, even if I appreciate dang.

I really dislike how political/personal everything gets around here, even the tech discussions, and the tech discussions themselves are full of breathless hype and hot takes that don't really make sense, too many people that learned something last week and then rave about how x and y changed their life. I don't know what early Slashdot was like, though, how it compared.

Re: Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?

#267

Post by mech422 »

osrec wrote: post #52
vardump wrote: post #7

1996 or so: altavista.digital.com! I loved (and got pretty good at due to daily training, heh) using boolean operations to find whatever I wanted. No Google back then. Nowadays Google finds so much noise that I wish I could use boolean operations once again to weed out the spam. Also liked slashdot.org in its early days.

Do you feel the simplification (or perhaps, dumbing down) of search queries is a bad thing?

I do... being able to craft a query that returned _just_ what you wanted and not having to wade thru 10 pages of results because 'page rank' put all the really good stuff on page 5+....
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