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by shantly 2432 days ago
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.