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Comment by raytopia | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the internet needs a giant directory of indie websites. So you can actually surf around and find them.

The big modern search engines almost have to be intentionally hiding these websites because they're nearly impossible to find without using an alternative engine like wiby.me or search.marginalia.nu.

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I was just going to post a comment similar to this. We've swung towards walled gardens of piles of content instead of graphs of individually curated links.

Exactly that "surfing" or "webring" or "stumbleupon" style of actually browsing in a larger content rather than searching or push-promote within that pile of content.

The walled gardens are better for many of the internet's main uses.

If I need to find out what vodka to buy I Google with site:reddit.com and pick the post that's obviously written by alcoholics. The small web can't touch that.

I don’t think Google hides small sites as much as people are really good at SEO for Google specifically.

Like my blog has literally 0 SEO and you’ll never find it, but a friend of mine has a blog where he does not post very often, but spends a lot of effort on SEO and it’s very easy to run into his blog.

The SEO meta destroyed small blogs.

It's impossible to say this is something they do, but it's worth noting that Google also has an economic incentive to mostly show commercial/ad-ridden results, as leading users to blogs with no adsense on them make them less money; so it would at least be in their interest to let the search results look like they do.

To fully understand Google you need to look at them not as a service that brings websites to people, but directs people to websites.

“we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

-- Sergey Brin and Larry Page

http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-advertising-and-search-e...

Appendix A in this paper is a gem as well:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Contains the quote above and “The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”

So what we observe in the deterioration of Google search was predicted by its creators, who made the deliberate decision to let this happen by accepting advertising.

Google went public in 2004, after that I don't think any amount of founder idealism could have saved it from shareholder pressure. If anything it's remarkable they held out as long as they did.

It’s so unfortunate that no one inside Google is taking any decision to clearly make things worse. It’s simply the structure of their business that is fundamentally wrong, and their founders had correctly identified the problem right at the start.

I think the game of SEO works in the favor of advertisers naturally.

Google doesn’t need to downrank small sites, it just happens.

Maybe it’s just semantics

It's not like it's impossible to combat search engine spam. The by far most effective tool is to just go after affiliate links and ad-heavy websites. Penalize those websites and 99% of the search engine spam vanishes.

Though as noted, this is not in Google's economic interest to do.

https://ooh.directory/

ooh.directory is fantastic, I particularly liked the stance that only add a few sites a week are added, which allows to "digest" these sites. Sadly, no new sites have been added since nearly three month. I assume this is just an instance of "Life happens" - it is a single person venture after all - but if there were a dozen similar attempts at handpicking and cataloguing the "good web", it would not hurt.

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