Access to information should not have (ranked, optimizable, commercially-bent) search as its base interface. This is a cosmic, civilization-level screwup. Not only do you get the decades of SEO and advertising, but the whole system becomes lossy over time. You can't find what you used to anymore.
Sure, it has its own problems with edit wars and editor politics, but compared to the cesspool of SEO spam on Google, Wikipedia is an information paradise.
For manually curated content, Google and other search companies were solving that in 1998 because manual curation wasn't feasible for the amount of content on the internet. It's been 25 years since then, and we're not exactly producing less content online.
People want manually curated information. They don’t want automation which by its very nature, as a fixed set of parameters, can and will be gamed.
What does "manual curation" mean in this context? I think it really just means "absence of spam/low quality content", which manual curation is not strictly necessary for.
Reddit has avoided
[0] objectively quantifying importance is an entirely different can of worms, but people know what's important to them
I rather suspect that they'll regain some popularity. Probably not general-purpose ones, but a variety of directories each covering a specific kind of site.
> Anything completely manual isn't going to be "web-scale".
True, but even so, it might still be an improvement. Especially if it's hundreds of different directories, each with their own tight focus.
By date?
Apple blocks all tracking in Safari by default and builds search engine without ads for iCloud+ subscribers.
Personally I can't find much on Google if I'm actually searching for something I don't know about. Finding the local mechanic is fine but querying a programming question, health problem or recipe is absolutely fucked. I sold all my Google stock recently but should have done so sooner. The value they have is in gmail and gsuite accounts but I can see the search business is circling the drain.
Conspiracy theory: they love showing shitty sites because those sites display adverts making Google money.
"Google knows this, so it adds a “Question and Answers” block before the first SERP result, probably diverting a tremendous amount of traffic away from that page."
They scrape answers from sites that they used to send traffic to and publish it themselves. In many cases, though, those sites won't exist without the incentive of organic search traffic.
I get why Google does it, but it does create a feedback loop where less of that info will be out there to scrape.