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by rsync
965 days ago
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I'm open minded but ... Comparing the atrocious search landscape of 2023 to personal indexing is to compare poorly. Instead: those who lived through it should compare personal indexing to the golden years of altavista(.digital.com) and the extremely powerful and unpolluted results it produced and modified with boolean operators. I never once thought that there was some utility left to be mined from the Yahoo approach to things once I switched to Altavista. I think we're only pining for personal indexing in comparison to the garbage that is Google in 2023. |
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A huge amount of the crap on the web is there because of Google. If you think what makes it to the top 10 is bad, you should see the crap that doesn't make it. A different search engine, with different intentions, would have to filter all that out.
If you don't believe me, try setting "showdead" on your HN profile and see all the posts the system makes [dead] before you even see them because people have some crap blog and they post nothing but links to their crap blog. I almost feel bad for those people, had they done that in 2013 they might have actually shown up in Google, today they can do that until they are blue in the face and get about zero traffic, not because Google is effective at filtering that crap out, but because they will be buried underneath all the people doing the same.
A better resource today would have to start with some radical choice such as whitelisting, if only to reduce the head-end costs of ingesting material.
It's tempting to imagine some rules like: no ads, no popups of any kind, government mandated or not, especially no cookie banners, no paywall, but even sites like Wikipedia fail at those criteria today.