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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that Google was only good in 1998 precisely because it was pre-Google. Now the web is SEO'd to hell and actively trying to prevent you from getting good search results.

A "new old Google" would only be good at searching the 1998 web, and if all you want is nostalgia, http://theoldnet.com is right there.

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Exactly.

I don't think its only the google search algorithm to blame, this has a lot to do with the extinction of old school forums and blogs. These days large part of the real discussions and posts without financial motivation have moved to facebook, whatsapp groups, discord, slack and other places behind logins and paywalls which google can't index. What's left in public are mostly blogs and websites motivated by affiliate or ad revenue and SEO'ed to death. So there simply is much higher garbage to valuable content ratio in the public, indexable web.

95% of my Google searches are suffixed with "MDN" or "site:reddit.com".

If I'm looking for something particularly technical I'll search HN. That especially helps when I feel at my wit's end about some general concept like "sinuses" or "parenting". It's more common to get my mind blown by some offhanded revelation dropped by an HN commenter.

Same, I also often use site:reddit.com Thankfully Reddit is still left mostly indexable, but most of the other sites where discussions take place are not.

My experience is that Google continually improved up until around 2014 or so. For the last 3 or 4 years it has slowly been getting worse.

I spent the holidays with someone who does all their searches using only voice input. His eyesight is poor and he chooses to just say what he wants instead of putting on his reading glasses and typing it out. The types of things he was saying and the level of understanding his phone had if him wouldn't have been possible in 2014.

Ironically, I specifically remember the introduction of voice search coinciding with a marked drop in search quality. This had also happened earlier with their "instant results" experiment.

Google did good work fighting against SEO over optimization for a long time. Then they gave up and it all went to hell. I stopped using them a few years ago. I found their practice of dropping search terms infuriating. I switched to DuckDuckGo which is arguably lower quality but less infuriating.

Agree. The web material being searched is bad at the source. So there's little that a search engine can do to improve it. As the adage says - garbage in, garbage out.

The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search engines. Google came along with a better algorithm for sussing out the signal if what content people found useful from the noise of attempts to trick the browser into increasing relevance signal.

It's not entirely clear what the next iteration of algorithm should be... SEO has gotten very good at its game.

> The web was SEO'd to hell in '98 also, for other search engines.

But mostly with invisible meta tags, not phrases repeated multiple times and texts written by content creators with no passion towards the subject.

Today's web posts remind me of ridiculous SEO-driven "effective product names" on multiple sites with low value products or fakes.

SEO aside, '98 web was passionate while today's web is written for robots, not humans.

So we need a new web.

We need competition. A new web would be a temporary benefit exactly because it would have competition, until it doesn’t.

The issue though is fracturing a new web likely wouldn't solve it, just introduce another fracture. Instead of the web being open and someone having their own information site content is split based on the creators preferred medium. Some people post on Reddit, some on yt, some on fb, Instagram etc. Each of the "major sites" has its own atmosphere where any subgroup can exist. In the early years each subject had its own community website, or a few of them often with overlapping members and links to each other. The purpose of the sites was strictly information and community around that subject. Their was normally a forum and then write ups / blog post, featured content and links to other sites.

I used to visit like 20 or 30 forums everyday and get great content. Then answering and getting help was a lot easier too. I had an RSS setup that pulled it all in and things were great. Somewhere around 2009 things just started to fall apart with each dominant social media or content site having their own sections for everything.

The barrier to entry for setting up a wide ranging community became far too low, along with that came the barrier to entry of bad information. I'm in several Facebook groups and subreddits concerning topics that interest me and the information is often crap. Also the same questions over and over. All the things people would complain about on the older forums is now the bulk of the content in FB groups, none of the good features are their, the format is terrible and every discussion eventually seems to turn into politics.

Gemini is nice.

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