[jacquesm]

Yesterday I wrote a blog post about an interesting company, I couldn't find the URL even though I knew exactly what they did and where they were located. It took forver - and DuckDuckGo - to finally find the website. I'd forgotten their name and had put of writing that blog post for long enough that it had slipped my mind.

That isn't the first time this happens either. It's extremely frustrating to not be able to locate a page that you know is out there.

[shantly]

I used to be able to find specific pages on the Web by googling for unusual words I expected would be used to link to them, not on the page itself, to pick an extreme example of the sort of triangulation one used to be able to use to track down lost pages or sites.

That kind of thing hasn't worked in... god, at least a decade, at this point. Not just because the Web is larger, but because search doesn't seem to work like that anymore and also everything got way spammier. "Clever" searching is a skill I was once (judging by people's reactions) notably good at but that is entirely obsolete, but not because the function it served was replaced by something better—it's just gone now.