90s web : content good, looks rubbish
2019 web : content rubbish, looks good
trying to help my kid with research reports &etc is a nasty chore these days -- for the amount of effort it takes to find a decent informative non-wikipedia page these days, may as well go to the physical library
It was kind of believable at the time.
Old web was a mess of people making things as expression, excitment. I think it matters to feel being 'connected' to someone rather than parsing a rendered data structure.
I felt the same reading old encyclopedias, you can feel the author way of thinking a bit. It feels a bit more enjoyable.
Or at least it would have looked good, if it wasn't covered in "SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER" and "ACCEPT OUR COOKIES" light boxes.
Which is only slightly less rubbish than having it covered in the semi-pornographic pop-over ads of yore.
Firefox, please treat "can set cookies" as a permission and allow me to set it to "ask" by default, and allow it to be toggled by clicking on the site permissions lock box. The existing user interface does not give me any control.
I've been meaning to set up YaCy for a while and see if the P-t-P search structure works better for finding non-scroller web pages. I fear that I'll find those results also tainted by shills.
[edit: Forgot to mention Gigablast, which works fairly well. Definitely not for the faint of heart]