Does anyone remember websites?
tttthis.com
tttthis.com
From their about page:
Search engines like Google are indispensable, able to find answers to all of your technical questions; but along the way, the fun of web surfing was lost. In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding those gems, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well. But finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet.
I like that search site already.
> What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism, all else is publicity.
> Paul Fussell
Someone, quick - point Ukraine and the Baltic states to this article "The Tank is Dead": http://g2mil.com/Anti-armor.htm
"US and Baltic troops — and American airpower — would be unable to halt the advance of mechanized Russian units and would suffer heavy casualties in the process" (https://en.delfi.lt/lithuania/defence/russia-could-occupy-al...)
BTW, this was a study from Rand Corporation!
And my favorite article on it: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...
(No association)
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But thank goodness for the Internet Archive! (FWIW, I've donated several times, it has helped me out so many times)
The article of interest is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170920090047/http://www.otherh...
Is there some more information about it? I found that it is done by https://www.wireservice.ca Is there a technical info?
I was wondering how big the index is. Because it may be just possible to serve the multi-gigabyte index with torrent. Then the update mechanism would serve only deltas. It could be then used locally. However index would probably have to be without content - so no snippets. I don't know if it would be useful that way.
It could use a comparison site. Side by side with Google for the same search. I would certainly want to use it this way for a while.
I think this is the way for the alternative search engine to somewhat succeed. Because I think it's almost impossible to compete with Google at being Google. Look at how Bing manages.
... is exactly the thing that I'm most worried about losing. Especially when I hear about all sorts of "adaptive" crap that learns about what I do and adjusts my daily feeds, search results etc. accordingly. It probably works great for most people, but I'm definitely not one of them and I want to opt out of the adaptiveness of modern Web. Most of the time there is no clear way of doing that.
(fwiw, author appears to be a Rails developer)
Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent".
It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.
Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.
Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
It was/is different: folks who are excited enough about something to build a website to share it have more interesting and deep content than you typically find on social media.
These days The same goes for people with personal blogs (or website) as opposed to medium and other one design blogging platforms.
It's just that the web has gotten bigger and more mainstream, and most of us now limit our browsing to a few silos and then act as if everything that no longer bubbles up the filter must have ceased to exist.
But perhaps you are right. Any tips on how to find the new gems?
That's a good question - I don't know. Discovery of anything not SEO optimized is difficult, and a lot of that content was on Geocities and Tripod, so the modern equivalent might just as likely be on Wordpress or a service like Wix, making the design homogeneous even if the content isn't. Ironically, I've found most off the beaten path sites through references in Youtube videos and Reddit. When I was getting my CS degree, the web design class involved building a quick personal site, so URLs connected to colleges might also be a good place to look.
But what's more likely, that no one is writing their own custom HTML sites anymore, or that some people are, but we just can't see them because they exist in their own ecosystems beyond the Googlesphere (and possibly even the Anglosphere?)
...I just realized I'm vaguely arguing for (but not defining the parameters of) a Drake Equation for the web, where N is new personal content. Even if the parameters are low, the scale of the web means N should be significant.
For better or worse, the closest thing today to the feeling of the old personal webpage era is Tumblr. The kids get up to some crazy stuff over there.
I used to like those.
I remember 10+ years ago we designed websites so that important content was "above the fold". Today people are addicted to scrolling their Facebook feed.
But individual entries are definitely advanced examples of "above the fold" design that is good for advertisements, not for pages.
Dunno, how much of this is also just getting older and set in our life routine? When was the last time I explored my own city on a bike like I would as a kid? Our interests and patience for browsing change.
How old are you now vs in this "golden era of the web"?
Most of those stories just sound like nostalgia to me. Like suggesting that games these days aren't as good as they used to be because look how less time you spend gaming these days.
It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was obscenely expensive and not much better than Google can do today. You paid by the minute or, in my case, the university did.
It was pretty terrible.
Then, this fancy world wide web came about, only it had been world wide before that, albeit at a different scale. It was pretty great.
Now? It's much better in that it is much more useful. I can still make discoveries of novel content, but I seldom do. I search, rather than browse, when I seek information on a subject.
It's not nostalgia, I don't think. It's much more useful today. It was pretty terrible the first times I used it. In fact, it wouldn't improve for like a decade, maybe longer.
If it helps, I also hated computers back then. They were slow, unintuitive, and I had to learn to program to actually have a functional (well, useful to me) device. They clanged, beeped, and whirled. They made dreadful noises and did exactly what you told them to do, even if what you told them to do was stupid. They didn't have things like a recycle bin. Hell, they didn't even have internal storage.
One computer was so horrible that I had to buy 'memory chips' (RAM) just so I could use lowercase letters. All told, it cost me more than a brand new car. You know what I did with it? I played Zork.
Edit: that translation was done by a human, by the way. It could take a week, or more, to get something translated.
It's the same with the web. When it went big in 1994, no one knew what they were doing, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous pages, only this time with so many ads that it takes 500 requests to download your typical page these days.
What I think people are missing is this original, outrageous and anything goes type of experience. But I suspect the Cambrian explosion of web expression is dead for the time being.
[1] Qix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix). An abstract game that was mainstream and quite popular at the time. Haven't seen much like it sense.
[2] "The Earth Dies Screaming", a game I've never seen but the name alone is so evocative that I still remember it to this day. I think it was in the "alien invasion" genre popular back then.
I sometimes still do that with Wikipedia articles and their sources, it's a fun way to kill a couple of hours and can lead down some really interesting rabbit-holes.
okay yes the web is more "useful" to most people, and maybe only slightly more useful to me, but that usefulness is significantly offset by some majorly-serious concerns about privacy, performance, and reliability.
I'll have a better reply later :)
+ Google Search is about as good now as it was back in 2007. I like that its interface has (largely) changed.
+ Google Maps with smooth scroll is nice, and its integration to 3d street view is nice too.
+ 1990s MapQuest without AJAX was nice though, in its own way. Even with Google's smooth scrolling, the only real thing Google Maps has going for it is IMO a cleaner display.
+ Wikipedia's generally better today than 10 years ago, yes.
+ Airline websites are a nightmare to use. Try getting an optimal route that doesn't use a single airline; and try getting that optimal route without ended up getting spammed or surcharged.
+ Youtube having virtually every song is nice for some people. It's not so nice for me. The songs on there are usually pretty boring or low quality audio or video or both. I pay for a music service (di.fm) for a reason.
+ Reddit/HN are pretty neat.
Okay, that's about where we agree (along with your comment on Facebook).
Let's look at some of the downsides.
- Personally, I find Reddit's method of linking to articles vs loading comments to be counter intuitive and confusing.
- Ebay is still about as trustworthy as you can spit.
- Amazon.com is among the crappiest web interfaces I've seen, and that's ignoring the company's history of abusing compensation and livelihoods of their employees and contractors. It's slow, extremely noisy (which contributes it to being slow), difficult to navigate, and I definitely never intend to buy from the marketplace specifically because I might as well have bought stuff from ebay.
- Just about every website has tracking up the wazoo. That contributes to a slower web experience both in bandwidth cost as well as hardware performance. Not everyone has a wonderfully new computer to handle all that. And if you're in America, chances are pretty good that your bandwidth is sub-par as well.
- Email. Why do we still have to deal with phishing and tracking? This is something that has been around pretty much since HTML was introduced to email.
- Instant Messaging. Slack and Discord are the newcomers but they're also somehow the best. They're popular because they get it "right"; it's super easy to text, talk, video, share files, share screens, etc. But they also get it wrong. That Electron UI has got to be the one of the biggest memory behemoths I've ever seen. Both are yet more walled gardens.
- The newer versions of Skype are absolutely dysfunctional compared to the older versions, MSN was better, AIM is (was) better, even IRC does file transfer better more reliably (although optional and clunkier).
- Mobile Apps. JFC banks going to mobile apps when the marketplaces are full of fake apps. This is absolutely not user friendly. Build on top of that the fact that phone numbers are super easy to fake or steal and you've got a clusterf!@# personal security nightmare just waiting to happen.
- Phones, operating systems, applications which track absolutely everything you do. It eats up my bandwidth, my system resources, and provides no visible benefit to me whatsoever. What happens when someone figures out how to track what I say to whom and when, and use that to "guide" me to buy things?
I could go on and on about more stuff but I don't care to at the moment.
To me, the modern web today is better in virtually every way compared to 1990s web surfing.
+ Google search engine is better than Alta Vista and Excite.
+ Google Maps with smooth scroll, 3D streetview, and satellite view is better than the clunky 1990s MapQuest without AJAX. Google Maps also uses colors to highlight traffic congestion.
+ Wikipedia is better than the non-existent online encylopedias of 1990s
+ airline websites now bring up a graphical map of the airplane and let you click on the actual seat you want. When I booked etickets from airline websites in 1998, it was just rudimentary ticket purchase.
+ youtube obviously has videos but it also has virtually every song. If some music forum mentions an obscure song, I think to myself that someone else may have already uploaded it to youtube. Sure enough, 99% of the time, it's there. It's even better than Spotify in that respect.
+ discussion websites like reddit/HN are better than Usenet. The better replies are voted and sorted at the top. I learned a lot of C Language from USENET "comp.lang.c" in the 1980s and I'm jealous that today's programmers have StackOverflow which is better. Again, the superior answers are voted to the top.
+ Amazon.com also made the UI better. In 1990s, they didn't have "Look Inside" feature to see sample pages of books. I use that all the time. One thing they did make worse is you now have to manually click "see all 50 reviews" to read all reviews; I assume they did that to prevent web scrapers. In any case, Amazon is good enough that I stopped wasting gas driving to Barnes & Noble.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a 1990s web experience that's superior to now.
I can only assume that a big part of why some think that today's web is worse has to do with Facebook and its walled garden. To those people, the web feels "less open". Well, I don't have a Facebook account and none of my longtime friends do either. Therefore, it doesn't feel like the web is any less open to me.
The web is more useful now in 2017 than 2007. And back in 2007, it was more useful than 1997.
While HN has some measures to reduce hivemind voting, it's quite rampant on the default subreddits.
I've actually changed the topcolor to #222222 in my settings so I don't see what my account's karma is. It completely ruins the ability to see the "new" "threads" etc links without a truly irritating amount of eyestrain but it's worth it - I recently asked genuine question about something I wanted clarification on and the comment ended up being downvoted to -4. Now I can't see my karma score I don't care about this, whereas before when my karma was shown on almost every single page throughout the site I'd obsess over making my comments universally good.
Comments are manipulated by teams of paid "trolls", including in English, and including Hacker News (when the article is of interest to a particular corp or gov -- like the Tesla mass firing article on Hacker News recently, just to give an example I know of).
I strongly disagree with this, as Usenet and even mailing lists offer many advantages over web forums. With web forums, I can't natively...
- Store, read, search content offline
- Read only new messages
- View thread context
- Access information redundantly (no SPOF)
- Killfile senders
- Integrate viewing and composing with local tools
While a particular site mitigates its disadvantages, perhaps via a better UI or via information not available elsewhere, the medium as a whole cannot. A website might be a fine view of information, but it should not be the only interface to that information. Doing so prevents all of the above uses and makes it much harder to reuse content in ways unforeseen by the original site. I suspect this is the root of the problem -- such reuse is not desirable for most sites, as it conflcts with their business model.
It's interesting you didn't list any disadvantages of Usenet. NNTP protocol doesn't have identity authentication. Therefore, you get spam and forged headers. This isn't any fault of NNTP; it was built for a different era. From a content standpoint and not a technical one, USENET was at its peak, before 1990s, when it was primarily universities and governments. The smallness of the tech community and the inherent collegial atmosphere didn't exploit the vulnerabilities in NNTP. I'll agree with others that it all rapidly declined after AOL opened it up to the masses. To regain the "reading pleasure" I got from USENET in the 1980s, I have to use Reddit/HN/Stackoverflow.
You listed the following technical advantages:
>- Store, read, search content offline
>- Access information redundantly (no SPOF)
>- Integrate viewing and composing with local tools
I'll group those 3 bullet points together since they are related to each other. I agree that those technical advantages are true for USENET. Your comment spurred me to revisit my USENET usage history and attempt to articulate why it's no longer relevant to how I use the web.
I participated in USENET from ~1988 to 2006 -- so about 18 years worth activity. The last years of downloading and reading messages was a tedious chore. With Usenet messages having no voting system, I had to slog through a sea of bad replies to get to the good comments. It was a horrible waste of limited reading time.
Once I got hooked into Reddit in 2006, reading crowdsourced comments became more of a pleasure again. Yes, I 100% agree that voting leads to "groupthink" and "hivemind". But even with those problems, catching up on 500 unread messages ranked by votes instead of 500 messages in pure chronological order is easier. I already suffered through unvoted messages for 18 years. I don't want to go back to that. Experiencing Reddit made me realize that the "terrible voting system" is the unofficial way we combat the "Eternal September"[1]. (Also, the Google search engine was better than anything else because it weighed the "unoffical votes" of links in the PageRank algorithm.)
Forum voting is like that saying about Capitalism -- "it's the worst forum system, except for all the others".
Usenet was like doing homework. Reddit is like a quick dopamine rush.
It's good that both Reddit and Usenet can coexist. A subreddit like "reddit.com/r/cpp/"[2] can coexist with USENET "comp.lang.c++"[3]. Although I have almost 2 decades of training to compose offline messages for "comp.lang.c++", I have no urge to do so. The technical advantages for Usenet you listed doesn't offset its flaws in content. These days, I just go to the C++ subreddit to get my daily fix on what's new because the content is better presented for limited reading time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
On the other hand, during that time the technology became immeasurably better - my first dial-up connection was 9.600 kbps if I remember correctly, now I have 4 Mbps; I didn't have a math co-processor back then and now we have multicore monsters of CPUs - and so on.
The question (to me) is not if the current Web is more useful, but if the increase in usefulness is anywhere near the technological progress?
At some point, the technological limits - like no YouTube because both the necessary download speeds and compression algorithms were not there - were replaced by something else. Back then we could believe that, in time, seeing the rate of progress, we'll get everything we ever wanted. The tech advanced and now we could have all these things we dreamed about, but don't - because of political and economic factors.
Yes, the Web improved drastically, despite a couple missteps (like IE6) along the way. But I believe the improvement is much lesser than the current technology would enable were it not for non-technological factors.
On the brighter side, once developed, technology is here to stay, so if we deal with all the current problems we'll be free to advance the Web further. But that's a pretty big "if"...
- excite chat was better than anything we have today, irc chat remains awesome.
- on social networks of yore, you could actually meet new people. you could search for new people and expand your circle to people completely outside it. I believe its against facebooks TOS to try and connect to someone you dont know. i know my account was banned for 3 days because someone declined with 'they dont know me'.
- youtube sucks for viewing songs. like really sucks. you have commercials MID SONG. one time I had a playlist play a 15 minute long commercial. FIFTEEN MINUTES. half the songs in my playlist end up getting removed, and It doesnt tell me the song it use to be. so if i find a song i really like, add it to a play list and it gets removed, i completely forget about it. song lost. if you are going to compare songs, youtube losses hands down. napster / audogalaxy / was far superior. youtube is still great for watching a cat jump in a box, after watching a minute long commercial of course.
- google search is great, its superior to alt vista, which is why i switched from alt vista to google when it came out. but google gets stuck, if it cant give you want you want in the first 5 hits, it basically cant do it ever. you have to change search strategies. alt vista was bad, but the content was diverse. you could still find gems 5 'nexts' in. google also gets locked in on what it knows about me. sometimes i have to search in incognito mode to find what i want.
the 1990s web experiences was not just about how well content was delivered to you. you could chat a person you never met with a simple ASL. maybe you continued talking after the first day, maybe you didnt, but it was fun and you met new people all the time. people dont want to meet new people anymore.
people dont email or contact eachother anymore. before people would put effort into staying in touch. i remember checking emails with excitement. now even though you can talk to your network at any day, because you are always connected people dont. and its just a 'hey whats up'. people dont write long responses saying how their day was, and how their cat got locked int a closet, etc.
edit: i forgot to say the original digg was awesome, and in may ways better. also, I think most of us are comparing the web from 1998 - 2006, not the late 90s.
YouTube is insanely useful for learning how to do basic household stuff, minor car repairs, that kind of thing. Insane.
Mundane? Yeah, but life is like at least 50% handling mundane shit like that. Maybe 90%. Maybe 95%?
Want to know how to repair some brick stairs in front of your house? Sharpen a lawnmower blade? Mulch a garden? Seal a driveway? Change the cabin air filter on a 2008 Mazda 3? Make pancakes using campsite cooking tools? Multiple videos for each. Perhaps even dozens.
Phenomenal stuff, but it seems like the things that most places (universities in particular) are still holding out on are things like problem sets. Hard to know how little you know until you have materials challenging your depth of understanding. Watching a lecture without doing associated problems is like trying to learn to play basketball without touching a basketball.
I guess it forces the presenter's personality into the spotlight a bit more than pure text and images. Probably attracts a slightly different kind of person. But I think the same spirit is there.
Anecdotally: I used to use StumbleUpon, and found it fun for a while. I'm not sure what caused me to drift away from it, but the reason I have no interest now is primarily that I am drowning in interesting content. (I have enough articles saved to Pocket to keep me going for years.) Getting recommendations tailored to your interests is nice, but unless the personalisation algorithm is really good, I think you can do better by cultivating your own set of sources and intermediaries.
Is there any proper enforcement of robots.txt or is it just polite? Because I don't see how one search engine could maintain an advantage if others start catalogging every site.
Legit search engines and aggregators have a strong incentive not to kill the golden goose by getting sued, particularly when the vast majority of sites actually want to be indexed.
The navigation is crappy (randomly interlinked handwritten HTML-pages) but the content makes up for it. The article by tttthis very much resonated with me. Many modern sites look great but don't have all that much actual content.
Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all.
To add insult to injury, if you do try very hard to seek the latter by carefully repeating similar search queries with slight word tweaks, quotes, and trying to dig through all the pages of results to see if you've found what you're looking for, Google will quickly decide that you're a bot and either give you a CAPTCHA or just ban you for a little while entirely.
This. A thousand times, this.
I really feel is the unfortunate consequences of our short attention span and everyone marketing towards an insanely short attention span is you get the firehose of information, but zero depth to any of it.
If I want to dig; really dig into a subject, 99% of what Google pukes at me is not helpful at all. A few times lately, I've ran into something I've found through Google, but trying to dig any deeper is futile. I've had to go down to the local library and start digging through news clippings, books and magazines. Actual, real old fashioned leg work.
I've come to feel like the internet has no depth anymore, everything is just enough to satisfy a .001 second attention span. Sad when you really stop and think about it.
plenty of creators
I've gave up googling for products I intend to buy (what has probably the largest revenue potential).
If you have access to, say, the bethesda press ftp, and compare the material there to any review of the games, you'll see that over 90% just copy-pasted without writing much themselves.
It's all fake.
Oh, and those that don't copy-paste often still review everything positively, because otherwise they won't get games before release anymore.
washing machine quiet
and 75% of the matches are ads.
Consumer reports was first but it's an ad - I should have stated I stopped using Google five years ago because it was so full of spam but now at least #3/#7/#12 are relevant and the rest are still ads and spam sites for me.
I once read that Google indexes 0.5% of everything publicly known.
This is a good explanation for why my friends search results are very different from mine. Google would spin this as individualization. Is there any way to get around this bubble and unearth fresh results each search ??
EDIT: I did not notice any differences so I don't really know how to test it. I search highly technical stuff for work or very mundane "popular" things outside of it. Seems like I'm bad target for the customization.
1. To find a community of enthusiasts and see what they have to say about products in that space. This works pretty well for products that actually have enthusiasts.
2. Go to Amazon and read a product's bad reviews. The good reviews are nearly useless. But, with bad reviews, you have to weigh the number of bad reviews against the product's popularity. If something has twelve negative reviews, that means very different things for a product that sells 10 units a month versus a product that sells 50K units a month.
3. Read the tiny handful of reliable product recommendation sites. Cool Tools, Wirecutter, annnnnnnd.... I'll let you know when I find another one.
I've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!
It can be a bit behind on the far changing stuff like electronics, and it can be pricey.
But I've never found them lacking in quality and detail.
I don't necessarily fault CR but I with the hundreds of models released all slightly similar but different (I hear partly to prevent price-matching across stores) it must be as impossible to review for CR as it is for consumers to keep track of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909365
Typical cartel-like, profit-boosting activity of oligopolies which appliance market seems to be with a handful of companies owning most brands.
But I found that they simply didn't update their guides nearly often enough to be useful.
Wirecutter's modern twist on CR's formula -- maintaining a frequently updated leaderboard in popular product categories, plus information on deals -- just winds up being more useful to me.
It also seems like Wirecutter has more relevant experts writing their articles. Maybe that's because they're actually better experts; maybe it just seems that way because WC articles begin with the author/authors stating their credentials and experience.
I tend to only look at 1-star reviews and 5-star reviews in passing. The first ones are obviously pissed with the product and that will colour their opinions. The latter are either enthusiasts that will love everything about it or people that heve just received it and/or are still on the honeymoon phase. I think ignoring them outright is as bad as focusing only on them, but I don't pay them too much attention.
I find that focusing on the reviews around the middle (and, of course, the number of those compared to the total number of reviews) usually gives me a better idea of the pros and cons of a product.
Recommend the BIFL (buy it for life) community on Reddit.
I have very mixed feelings about that. I have some serious experience there; I moderate a subreddit dedicated to audio hardware in which people often ask for and receive purchasing advice.
So on the plus side, you have some fairly knowledgeable people offering advice.
However, even your average "enthusiast" is pretty lacking. No enthusiast has experience with enough relevant speakers to really give informed recommendations. There are thousands of speakers on the market. I've used... dozens? And owned... half a dozen? I mean, nobody has direct experience with even one percent of what's on the market. We try to supplement that direct experience by staying on top of reviews and things, so we have a sense for what's popular and seems to have garnered a lot of happy owners, but it's still very conjectural.
And speakers are a product category where it is somewhat possible to own multiple products, and there is a semblance of objective measurement possible. So we have it easy.
What if you want to buy a fridge? Or silverware? Or socks? Or blankets? There probably aren't fridge enthusiasts and if there are, it's doubtful they own many fridges each. So, you wind up with users just giving anecdotal stories, tainted with heavy doses of confirmation bias, because of course people want to like the fridge they spent their cash on.
Or, worse, you get the opposite effect: brands that sell lots of volume will appear to have the highest failure rate, even if their failure rate is low. If you knew nothing about cars, or the sales volumes for various brands, combing the internets would give the impression that Corollas fail much more often than Lamborghinis. Because tales of mechanical problems for Corollas probably outnumber those for Lambos by a factor of 1,000:1. (My wife owns a Corolla! It's had a problem or two) Which would seem really damning if you didn't know that Corollas outsell Lambos probably 100,000:1 and in reality are probably an order of magnitude more reliable.
You get this effect with Apple products: any Apple-related forum has countless horror stories of failures from Apple owners. But, Apple products are actually generally reliable compared to the competition. It just so happens that they're the Corolla in this analogy, not the Lambo.
A lot of stuff just isn’t online. For one case I needed to look through a bunch of 19th-early 20th century rail and telegraph tariffs. These were generally published in booklets, but they were commercial materials so the Library of Congress doesn’t have many examples. But EBay did!
As a millennial I fall into the trap of thinking if it’s not Google it doesn’t exist. But the traditional methods your librarian taught you are still highly relevant even today.
There are all kinds of cool reference works out there. And Mann has a striking criticism of the impoverished, dumbed-down search interface that's ubiquitous now: the search box.
And yeah, it’s bottom-feeding scum behavior any time you see it, fit for failed used car salesmen and other low-ability scam artists. That’s the company Google workers keep, ethically speaking. Could be worse, but still bad enough you don’t want them near your kids or grandparents.
So, if you see it, then...
The Wirecutter fills this role with in-depth reviews, but their selection is limited and I prefer to have multiple sources when comparing products.
User reviews aren't helpful to me. They are very subjective, may value different attributes of a product and disappointed customers seem to have a greater incentive to broadcast their negative experience. The fact that your fridge broke down isn't necessarily representative of the product.
Another task Google is really bad at, is finding results by lyrics. As a music enthusiast and crate digger I often search for obscure, rare music I hear in sets, mixes and bootleg recordings. If there are vocals it's an obvious attempt to search for the lyrics - mostly without results. On the other hand the song I'm looking for is very likely up on Youtube, which has a surprisingly large selection of rare music uploaded by other collectors. Yet it's impossible to find those uploads by searching for the lyrics featured in them. Google should use its powers to auto-transcribe music on YouTube to lyrics. Sure, there will be a lot of mistakes, but it should be enough to give some results.
I was trying to find troubleshooting advice for a particular model of printer and no matter what keywords or modifiers I tried all the results were for low-quality shopping or review sites. Impossible to find actual information over the flood of SEO 'content'.
This is an interesting series on fake reviews: http://www.sitesell.com/blog/2017/07/fake-reviews.html
The company became interested in the topic because a competitor was training their affiliates to write fake reviews of the company's product as a bait-and-switch tactic. (They later did a study with methodology that showed their product does a 33X better job at enabling individuals to create high-traffic sites.)
Some of the worst niches, I’ve noticed, are those that have the potential to prey on people due to the nature of needs - health, make money online, pain relief, weight loss. If you can find a fair review when searching on product reviews, it’s pure luck.
I imagine that Google’s AI component of the algorithm should eventually be able to recognize and penalize reviews that actually do the customer a disservice. Until then, some of the suggestions in this thread are excellent.
Hope you find the link useful.
I always hoped that Google would add that functionality. Perhaps as a premium, paid service. But that ended up not being the business model they went with.
Nowadays if you 'deep stalk' someone or some thing then you will find their social media posts and profile on linked in.
Back then you were far more likely to be finding them on forums or sites they created, even on those 'guest book' pages - remember them?
Alta Vista and the advanced search functionality was useful up until 2003 or so, then they became part of Yahoo! and we all know what happens when that happens. I stopped using it then but also my particular use case had gone, I was doing different work and no longer needed the search results beyond the search results, i.e. where the whole internets is bisected for the match of two or more particular search terms and their negations. Happy times, but you did have to have the skill to search like that, it was more like using the index cards in a library than browsing the shelves, a mini superuser trick we no longer have even in Google 'verbatim' searches.
https://millionshort.com/about
Maybe 5 or 10 years ago. It's a search engine that filters out the top N websites.
However I just tried it and it seems to be poorly maintained -- it's crashing on certain queries, and giving me captchas after only a few searches.
Some people noticed this problem many years ago, and here is a solution which didn't quite work. But it might be something to learn from in attacking this problem.
Assuming that the information even exists, in a way, I think actual human curated links (aka like early yahoo.com) might be a better way to search if you could hire a few dozen people to start building them. I've even went down the thought process of building my own webcrawlers for the explicit purpose of building a personal search engine so that I could kill-file the few dozen sites that tend to show up as the default answers to 99% of google queries.
Nowadays, I just use blogs and ebooks to better guide my searches to find the (print) books or academic papers that I need.
It's almost coincidental how the quality of Google's results fell dramatically, shortly after the death of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia .
i remember web rings. i remember a full circle of sites providing 99% of the same content because it was easier to keep a website updated reusing the same popular content. and since the webring is the #1 source of popular content, it becomes a death torus into total homogeneity.
To emphasize this point, just the other day my 4-year-old asked me "how do seeds inside tomatoes grow?" The answer to such a simple question cannot be found in either DDG or Google because there are literally thousands of sites in this search that helpfully tell you how to grow tomatoes from seeds - the obvious search engine optimization to look for anything with "tomatoes", "seeds" and "grow" being definitely wrong in this case.
Note that it will only return results with pages that have those terms in that order.
eg. "tomato" "seeds" "grow"
allintext: tomato seeds growQuite often I'll search for an image of, say, a specific aircraft registration and be shown lots of other aeroplanes of the same type. Very clever, Google, but useless.
The full list of operators is here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?visit_id...
Or there's also advanced search: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890
DuckDuckGo has much the same set of operators.
In terms of how seeds end up inside fruits, Google found me this: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=640
I'm going to side with google for once: you should be doing your search in multiple steps, acquiring more specialised vocabulary as you iterate on your searches. Starting from seed, you'll end up learning that they're fertilised eggs, which you'll use in your second query which'll start digging you into domain-specific academia where younll assimilate enough keywords to have a pretty good idea of what you're looking for in domain-appropriate terms
Does the query "seeds growing inside tomatoes" (without the quotes) give you any relevant results?
Contrary to the GP comment, the unquoted string returns pretty much the exact answer to the 'question' as the top result:
https://uconnladybug.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/seeds-sproutin...
> hormone controlling the seed dormancy is exhausted or runs out, letting the seed grow in the moist environment inside the fruit. This warm, moist environment is perfect for germinating seed to grow. If the tomato was left uncut in the warm conditions, the new plant sprout would eventually poke through skin of the now decomposing tomato.
Try Google Books.
The Internet encapsulates all media.
The other day I saw a marabou bird in a wildlife documentary and was surprised by the hair-like stuff on its gular sack (the pink bag hanging from its neck). Wikipedia doesn't mention it and if you search for "marabou feathers" you only find that the world apparently obsesses about the fuzzy white crest on its neck that inspired fashion some decades ago. "Marabou hair" and "marabou hair feathers" likewise only yield information about fashion accessories. Even if you explicitly include "gular sack" Google unhelpfully tries to lead you towards information about the crest feathers.
This is definitely a case where even if you think you know all the relevant words you're unable to phrase a search query in a way that convinces Google you're not interested in the generic results everybody else is likely looking for.
And this isn't even a case that matters much. I was just trying to find out whether those feathers are actually a different type or just look more hair-like for some reason. It reminded me of a video I once saw about primitive proto-feathers we now know some dinosaurs had (affectionally called "dino fuzz").
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feather#Classification
2. Akester, A. R., Pomeroy, D. E. and Purton, M. D. (1973), Subcutaneous air pouches in the Marabou stork (Leptoptios curmeniferus). Journal of Zoology, 170: 493–499. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.1973.tb05063.x https://sci-hub.io/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.111...
The only thing that's changed about shady emulation sites in the last 20 years is that they no longer give you ill-conceived legal advice about ROM ownership being legal if you delete the ROM within 24 hours and/or are not affiliated with law enforcement.
But now I'm less likely to find stuff that I didn't know existed and don't quite have a name for. This kind of stuff was/is usually discovered by following hyperlinks. But I'm not sure why I have this experience less often.
To be fair, this feeling is very similar to what you feel when finding something really great in your Twitter queue.
Oh the irony.
The web has changed: in some ways for the worse, and in others for the better. I remember websites being like a lottery: sometimes you'd hit jackpot but most of them were "Under construction" GIFs over ugly tiled backgrounds.
There is still ton of content and much more than what I would've dreamt on the 90s. Platforms like Reddit allow everyone, whether they know HTML or not, to publish their own content and even comment on others'.
Yes, Facebook and Twitter suck, but that's mostly it. I'm very, very grateful for everything else on modern internet.
This smells like 'memberberries.
I agree with you on the value of reddit and platforms (and I actually value Facebook-type platforms as well, with the obvious qualifications), but the old html sites I write about here have a different type of construction, material, and value.
(- The author)
These still exist. They are prettier and more content packed than the 90s ones you're reminiscing about, and there are many, many more than there used to. I honestly think you're seeing the early web with rose-tinted nostalgia glasses.
Unless you liked the DIY amateurish hacker feel of it (which I agree has its value on its own) I think they've changed mostly for the better.
Just to be on the same page: what's exactly that type of construction, material and value you miss? What did you like of it?
EDIT: After re-reading your original post I think I get your point. It's just... #RememberWebsites, of course it's nostalgia-fueled! And that was the point of the post, right? Celebrating it (which I completely misunderstood as a celebration of websites themselves).
There are still many. Here's one that might fulfill your oldschool needs: https://www.justinguitar.com/
For other stuff, I agree with that OP article, that was a uniquely rich caleidoscope that got "blandened" (now lost/gone/fully-transitioned) as the types of folks who'd craft such little labour-of-love sites mostly did so for lack of easier / more-convenient options that soon popped up first with prefab forums and prefab Wordpress / Blogger, then Tumblr/Medium/social-media.
Oh you remind me of the beautiful paean to those GIFs in Olia Lialina's "A Vernacular Web", which is a pretty cool discussion of early internet aesthetics.
I also noticed the author doesn't even use a single hyperlink in his own article. Be the change you want to see.
I was just checking out Project Rho. Before that I was building a link page of my own because I'm getting into ham radio. The old web we love is still here and it'll always be around in some form.
I feel like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the number of open tabs makes things more confusing.
In short, sufficiently high branching factor means that neither depth first nor breadth first search can keep up without a lot of memory.
EDIT: Note that, at over 100 tabs per browser session, I am probably an extreme edge case. :)
Windows NT made the browser crashing your computer a little less common.
Linux wasn't any better - the only graphical browser then for Linux was Netscape, and and that was even less stable on Linux than on Windows.
(- the author)
But that might not be the one you mean... I recall one with a black background... hmm.
/edit/ I also found this one: http://www.crystalinks.com/ ...I (probably badly) archived a copy of it around 2000/2001, back then many pages had dark graphical backgrounds. It seems that has changed.
There was also the Temple of the Screaming Electron, which has since disappeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOTSE
I will be putting in more internal hyperlinks as I have more pages on the website to link to. Most of the articles there are still in progress, and this one is a sort of introduction to the HN community (which is my main source of news and analysis these days).
Please link me to your ham radio site when you get it ready for us. I'm also building a list of these types of blogs/sites.
(- the author)
Here's how I recall it:
Back in the day, you'd search for subject {$foo} and you would find mostly websites written by some cranky bearded weirdo who is obsessed with {$foo}, who has devoted weeks of his time to personally collating his every thought about {$foo} into one ghastly-looking site.
Nowadays, you search for {$foo} and find mostly beautifully template-designed pages of text written by indifferent fiverr freelancers who had about 20 minutes to stuff in as many keywords into as many column inches wrapped around as many ad slots as possible before moving on to the next subject.
I know which one I prefer.
(I may exaggerate. But only slightly.)
Yeesh, does anyone else have this opinion?
I sure don't. It's never been more trivial to find good, enriching content.
How many of these posts are just HNers getting more crotchety in their old age? Sometimes it just seems like a pissing contest for who can be most cynical. ;)
Sure, they exist, and I do stumble on them from time to time, but most of the time I will find what I'm looking for, often with a wealth of user comments as well.
I will willingly cop to this. But seriously, genuinely yes, the internet is full of a lot more content-free clickbait than it used to be. Because clickbait didn't used to be a thing that existed.
It used to almost entirely be populated by people who actually cared.
Let's take a really simple example. I'd like to see information about "rocket engines." Just masses and masses of enthusiast information for/from a technical point of view. Think something like Atomic Rockets [1] but more technical and less sci fi. An example of the 'ethos' I'm talking about would be something analogous to Fredric Parker's videos about KIC 8462852 / Tabby's Star / 'that star with the really bizarre dimming characteristics' [2]. Just an informed, obsessive, educated enthusiast targeting the exact same. I'm certain such sites exist. In the days before 80% of Google's links went to the same 20% of sites, they were really easy to find.
Google is excellent at finding low grade mass media on the latest topics, but I think their ability to find meaningful information has been deteriorating. E.g. getting back to those video's on tabby's star - if I search google for the same, I find no less than 4 hits with aliens in the title and just about as many alluding to have found 'the' explanation. It's complete trash (though Fredric's videos do hit the second page!). Granted, it's closer than the hardcore porn I might have found on the first page searching in the late 90s, but it seems like we've replaced porn with clickbait. If that's my choice, I'd prefer tits.
I'm slightly nostalgic for shared Windows folders on LANs at college dorms. I remember seeing the first South Park short from such a folder as it was going viral.
I'm extremely nostalgic for the original Napster. I don't ever remember searching for a piece of music and coming up short. And I remember it being a very sudden shift-- one month you're making a mental note to search for a CD you misplaced somewhere back home, the next month you're getting on Napster to check if the theme to Ghostbuster's 2 has lyrics that recount the plot of the movie. It does.
A few weeks ago I typed "Battlestar Galactica" into Netflix, and guess what? It showed me lots and lots of results, none of which were Battlestar Galactica. And this isn't your run of the mill entitlement of a fool addicted to his Iphone apps. That is entitlement of a person yearning for modern functionality to match a shitty piece of software that saw its last stable release 15 years ago.
I'm having a hard time finding any numbers for the actual amount of music that was available on the original Napster at the time. Can anyone put some hard data to my rose colored glasses?
The one P2P thing I am nostalgic for is Audio Galaxy - it had an awesome system where it they indexed everyone's content on their website, so you could see every file that had ever been on the network and add it to your "want list", then when that person came online, it would start downloading. To be fair "wish list searches" in Soulseek serve a similar purpose, but I loved that ability to browse every file that had ever been online!
I can’t believe it’s under active maintenance after all these years!
I'm even more nostalgic of Direct Connect: Hey this person has this cool and rare thing I'm searching for let's download his file list to see what else they like.
this was the experience at my college, anyway
After you get your Gopher client set up (lynx in the terminal works great), a good starting point is gopher://sdf.org
There are many active "phlogs" published on SDF.org; there is also an aggregator that tracks some 20-odd phlogs at: gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta (though it seems to be down at the time of this posting).
The "Gopherspace" is a refreshing wormhole -- with a surprising amount of present-day activity -- into the Internet of yesteryear. I highly recommend checking it out and perhaps publishing your own content on Gopher if you're tired of the dumpster fire that is the WWW.
"Many people think the http protocol deprecated gopher, but that just isn't true. Where do you think gophers live? underground"
Edit: more gold
"After dumping linux and x86 in favour of return to real computers, we have not had any major security issues"
[1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Gopher:Src:
Every single website on the internet always was, is and will be HTML (with various kinds of XML/SVG markup sometimes). People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.
I don't see why I should feel nostalgia for an Internet plagued by `<marquee>`s, poorly-laid out flashing gifs and bright yellow text on a white background.
The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly.
That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
I also remember converting a site made entirely of Java applets to html and JavaScript in the early 2000s.
Unstyled HTML (optionally with user style sheets) is more usable and accessible than today's one-size-fits-the-designer design for the kind of content that used to dominate (and is still a large segment of) the web. (We've got better tools for making usable and accessible content, but they are mostly not used for that purpose.)
For interactive applications, its a different story.
Then gradually forgot about it? These days we have our WingDings (FontAwesome), popups ("please subscribe to our newsletter" modals), best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4 ("you are using an outdated browser"), best viewed in 800x600 ("please rotate your device"), auto-playing General MIDI music (auto-playing videos), slow load times (not due to a 28.8k modems, but bloat) and other ridiculous practices that don't really have any 1998 equivalents (hijacking scrolling, pop-in-pop-out menus, hijacking the browser history or giant banners that follow you around as you scroll (without using frames, so good practice!)). Often for no good reason. Where we had <marquee> we now have pop-in chat bots, subscription reminders, social media sharing links using a third of the screen, nonsensical page transitions etc.
It's all exploiting what could be very useful technology, and I'm not saying it's much better or much worse, but at least in the 90s the regression you'd experience by not running any scripts was that there wouldn't be any asterisk snowflakes falling around christmas, not that the plain text article you were about to read suddenly became unreadable or unnavigable. It seems the lessons consistently learned from the past are the most trivial and are ignorant of the cause of the original criticisms. Don't use tables for layout (instead implement your convoluted page layout using <div> pyramids and CSS hacks!), don't use frames (use "position: fixed;" to waste screen real estate instead, and use JS to break navigation!)
Web people were for a brief moment enthused with the idea of proper human- and machine readable content markup respecting established standards. But we're not there any more if we ever were, developers preferring to serve the most simple content using 500k of JavaScript and 200k of CSS browser workarounds over plain (X)HTML with simple styling.
I believe my own site would qualify? http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/
https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4...
> So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.
I write a blog, and publish links to posts on Facebook because doing so costs me nothing. It also gets me next to nothing. People click on those links about as often as Facebook asks me for my credit card to "boost" them.
Oh wow, I literally never want this behavior! Do you have a generic trick? "Inspect element" is tedious.
Oh,you mean like blogs?
Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone can have their own website.
I really don't miss the "glorious 90's" type of websites - with the thousand of animated images, weird background images and marquee everywhere. Sure it made every site unique - every site was terrible to the eyes in it's own special way.
Also the idea that all sites now look the same is quite preposterous - sure a lot of sites are cookiecutter websites - especially marketing websites, but there are tons of unique designs - especially for blogs and personal websites.
Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform.
I miss the days where you would encounter a blog filled with great content and with a unique look and feel. It's as if it almost burned in in my memory. I still remember how the website looked of some great articles that resonated with me.
That's one of the reasons I dislike Medium et al.
Sure everything on medium looks the same, but there are many many blogs not on medium.
Here, just after a simple search, a list of personal websites/blogs that look nothing alike:
https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-35-best-personal-websites...
"LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick."
Everyone being able to make sites is great, but I miss having sites that were deliberately organized rather than purely chronological. I wish the typical wordpress/livejournal had a frontpage similar to, say, http://www.gwern.net/ . In theory tags provide the same information, but somehow I've never found them useful in the same way.
Or, more likely, you clicked "back" on the "navigation bar" and it would 404 because the author messed up the links, since it was all hand crafted HTML.
Funny stuff aside, there are still loads of "websites" out there. If I understand the criteria here, we are looking for mostly hand crafted pages maintained by individuals (or small groups) that have interesting content. Something, should I say, very "web 1.0"?
Here's a good one. Make sure to check the GUI Gallery section:
User Friendly is always hilarious (unfortunately, updates stopped ages ago, but going through the archive is sill fun):
And here's something random, the best page in the universe:
Like I said, there are TONS of these out there. You just have to, you know, look for them.
But I still think he protests too much. The style subject-oriented websites which the author is referring to evolved slightly and got the new name "blogs". The blogosphere might not be as popular as social networking, but it is still huger than the web of the '90s.
Does the author mean web rings? I do remember these :)
Those and stumbleupon were fun surfing!
(- the author)
Bottom of the page.
These webrings with graphical designs most accurately capture my memories of them (possibly at their height) from the late 90s.
- Look for the sites with 4-5 letter callsigns on them
- Go to their links page
- Keep going down the rabbit hole.
EG. here's a few I just found googling:
Here is an interesting example: https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersio...
The thing is, this part of the web still exists, it's actually just simply harder to find due to the control on the filter big corps have these days. You just have to search. I am regularly adding hackers blogs to my bookmarks. Sometimes they stopped updating in 2012, but their writing still looks worthwhile. The real democratization of knowledge the internet offers to us is there for the taking if people would break free from their self-forged filter-bubble shackles.
Can we start sharing these somewhere? I have several I'd like to contribute.
Many days there wasn't a new web site. Some days there were two.
Some rose-tinted glasses right there!
Yes, perhaps I'm slightly bitter, why do you ask?
Between that and the "Wikipedia wall," boutique websites have been an endangered species for some time.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=flip%20shop
Now sites seem to be spread out across the behemoth sites like Medium and of course all the social media platforms. A lot of the fun and sense of adventure that was present in the early days of the web is gone. Now it's "just business" - that blows! When did everyone get so obsessed with boosting their "online presence" in order to make a quick buck?
I will also give a big thumbs up to Neocities. It's brilliant. There's a great retro feel to many of the sites there. People are having fun creating sites with HTML and a dash of CSS - for free.
Switching to Wordpress (obLink: https://mdhughes.tech/ ) and slowly reposting the stuff I want visible in an organized, searchable format with a consistent style and a nice CMS is the best possible improvement.
My latest change is a "Starred posts" category, so I can surface the longer, more thought-out pieces and still have ephemeral content like semi-daily music links and status updates.
Manton Reece's http://micro.blog/ is putting Twitter-like interaction under a blog framework, hosted on m.b or on your own site.
Discovery of these things is still hard, and Google's ad-searching site unsurprisingly only surfaces ads, but http://duck.go and social media (like HN) can point you at content you want to see. [ed: sp]
Once Capitalism takes over a system, everything is optimized for profit. Some diehard hobbyists might remain but most convert. I'm still keeping 2 niche blogs.. let's see till when.
Product Selection Engines (PSE's) were a different value proposition than product or brand promotion. They are fun to write for engineers because they correct purchase errors with IT good deeds like Consumer Reports but with user variables on priorities or constraints.
The Consumer Web threw out a great deal of baby with the .com era bathwater.
However JS is the real threat to websites, react and its ilk are not amenable to being stored long term.. Too many things break.
Still though, it was pretty fun when there were more than 5 or so websites to go to, like a lot of people tend to only do these days.
[1] http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/Bulletin/v11n2/papers/milligan.pdf
Startups /s
The Beaker Browser! P2P browser, bringing back (the web and) websites since 2017
Interesting like discovering and learning something new not like browsing shopping sites and FB, Instagram because there is nothing else to do...
It's bad to use tables for layout mind you.
Because you should use the much more semantic <div class="col-3">...
and a new old site also built with hand-crafted HTML but CSS rather than tables!
It's nonsense to say that such things no longer exist.
Although this type of style isn't common with the online web these days, it's still visible in offline caches of popular websites (e.g. offline Wikipedia). Pages load so fast, and the total file size is much smaller because of the lack of JS/jQuery/React/etc bloat.
great example of dense cool passion driven site
Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15634089
(Unless, of course, you mean by "almost anything" everything of your personal interest.)