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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I dunno. I feel like if there had been a human somewhere blogging or writing on a forum "I was thrilled to find this village in Croatia which really reminded me of my trip to Koh Lanta, one of my favorite places" -- then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page. Even if there are ten such things on the web today, I don't think it's gonna wind up in my google search. But am I overly optimistic about historical Google?

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IIRC Google of 15 years ago would have prioritised high PageRank sites containing the strings "Ko Lanta" and "Croatia" which would probably have been the Ko Lanta listings page of popular travel booking websites (with "Croatia" referenced somewhere in the sidebar).

It was less likely to ignore the absence of a particular keyword but certainly wasn't better at NLP

I think that's definitely the google of 10 years ago, 15 years ago might still have been like the parent commenter suggested. The reason being that the persons blog with travel information would be likely to have a higher pagerank than the popular travel booking sites which might also not be SEO optimized enough to hit that particular search.

> then Google of 15 years ago would have found it and put it on the first page.

I don't think Google of 15 years ago will do a good job on the current age of internet. The size of web has increased a lot like 100x where most of the increment comes from unstructured formats like video or image and its signal to noise ratio deteriorated considerably. SEO has become much more sophisticated ever. A large fraction of useful information is now locked in the unindexed walled garden.

Surely significantly more than 100x. I'd hypothesize 10,000x at minimum from 15 years ago, at least if you measure total bits. Not sure how I could confirm that conjecture though.

However the number of actual, genuine content (so excluding SEO listicles and so on) is definitely less than 100x.

In fact it could be less than 1x in many cases. People that would have blogged about their Croatia trip might now instead just have a 10 word tweet, an instagram story (of similar low quality and probably not publicly indexable), or a youtube video (so non text content)

> But am I overly optimistic about historical Google?

Well, I was about to post a similar reply. It would have taken some messing around with the search string, but I'm confident I would be able to find something like this on Google 18 years ago, and I'm certain that if it exists, I can't find it now (unless it's on some big name site).

I think you're overly optimistic about web of 15 years ago. You are more likely to end up with "CatLady05's archive Aug 2007 - list of beaches in Thailand (I'd like to visit some day!) - (blah blah) - summer trip to Venice - ..."

And then you learn that on a good day you could see Croatia from Venice, or something like that.

(I just completely made that up, don't quote me on that.)

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