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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

I would add that you could meet people on this walking trail who enjoy peace and nature and who aren't there anymore. Or if they are, they are mixed with others so you can't just say hi and have a moment together just based on the fact that you both know this trail.

People used to have personal pages, not just blogs, often trying to share their knowledge and notes on different topics. I miss that. Plus casual IRC.

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I still have my personal page:

https://www.walterbright.com

It hasn't changed much for 20 years :-)

Some people still have personal pages. Here are some that I've run into while reading HN:

https://www.gwern.net

https://bellard.org

A search engine for only pages catered by an individual and not a company would be very cool. The first PageRank patent recently expired[1], so one could use the early Google methods for setting up such a thing. I thought early google was great and much better than today's.

Say hello to Stephanie Kowalski, spammer-generated bot with a homepage entirely dedicated to the joys of essential oils.

Yes. This is exactly what would happen. It is sad.

Automatic aggregation can always be manipulated by advertising, no matter how its served up. Filtering is essential.

I occasionally feel like that already happened.

Looking at quite a few modern social networks, like Instagram, "success" and engagement on many of these platforms seems to follow many of the same rules people use for SEO in regular websites. From an outside perspective much of the difference between many influencer or aggregation accounts and a bot with nice imagery escapes me. (Although I realize much of that is just me being old and grumpy and the difference is likely the community around those figures that I am simply not a part of)

I wonder if it was a paid search portal owned by someone that did not feel the need to maximize profits could do a much better job? Like Craigslist worked well for a long time.

That exists already, it’s called Facebook.

Blogspot, and then Blogger, were bastions of spam.

What's it matter?

Or early Yahoo, when it was a human curated list of websites.

I thought early google was great and much better than today's.

In terms of treating bacterial infections, the early years of penicillin were also better than our own era because the pathogens hadn't evolved resistance yet. Early Google was great because the Web's pathogens hadn't evolved resistance yet.

Maybe one would have to have a system where the websites were vetted by people, set up trees of trust, and then let people choose the top of the tree and the depth for the search. Probably too computationally intense, if one has many nodes and websites, but it would be interesting to try.

Reminded me of a blog post from 2000, written by a disheartened techie during dot-com era. Here is what she wrote about the "dot-com" people: "They don't have personal sites. They don't want personal sites. They don't get personal sites. They don't get personal."

Here is the full post:

https://megnut.com/2000/04/14/ive-been-thinking-a-lot/

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