Search engines keep disappearing mysteriously
archive.org
archive.org
It is one left aligned column of pre-formatted text in an html file, which contains no style information or javascript.
One is that I cannot select part of the text, then copy and paste it into the "reference material" I keep in plain-text files on my local computer.
Another is that there is no convenient way to search, i.e., Ctrl+F does not work.
Another is that making the text larger[1] is less convenient: in general I need to right click > "Open image in new tab", then do the zooming rather than just do the zooming, and then the zooming is jumpier somehow (which I can handle, but it slows me down) and text never reflows. Sometimes after I zoom the image to make the text large enough for me to read easily, a column of text has become too wide for my screen so that I need to scroll back and forth horizontally for every line of text. That was not a problem with this specific image file, but IIRC I gave up right before I noticed that that would not be a problem.
Finally, even when the text I want to read is actual text (not an image) sometimes I have to resort to Ctrl+A (select all) then copy and paste the text into a text editor (because every web site is a snowflake, and some of the snowflakes are gnarly); knowing that this last resort is not available with an image file makes me less likely to try to read the image file.
The reasons I give above add up to a situation in which it is slower and more annoying to read from an image file than to read ordinary HTML text or plain text.
Also, I was already annoyed by archive.org even before I figured out that the thing I might want to read is an image file: the way my browser is configured (OS zoom set to 200%, then Chrome's zoom set to 80%, so the effective zoom of the viewport is 160%, but the browser chrome occupies twice as much vertical real estate as it would if OS zoom were 100%) when I land on the web page, more than half of the viewport is occupied by a plea for money at the top plus the two menu bars in the site header. (And the text in the plea for money is larger and sharper than the text of the content.)
[1] My eyesight is substandard.
1. The decline and eventual collapse of Gigablast
2. The decline of Google/Bing
3. The poor quality of other search engines like Chatnoir.
It's not clear that these three things are related. Gigablast seems as though it were a personal project, and indications are that it was mismanaged. (Posting bizarre political messages -- the sort of thing you'd see on novelty bumper stickers -- on your company's website does not inspire confidence.)
The decline of Google's search engine has been well characterized, e.g. in "Enshittification" and Ed Zitron's work, and it's quite well understood as the reflection of a perverse incentives problem.
Small search engines, e.g. Chatnoir, were never good. Bing, also, was never good -- outside a few narrow niches, like video search, and that very temporarily.
It's not impossible but it's clearly a hard problem, and all the other big companies seem to prefer doing something else.
I am guessing that these “taste tests” were done around that time or before, and I wonder how they would go today.
I found that by searching with DuckDuckGo (which is Bing) for "prefer bing" "taste test".
If that is what you are remembering, then I would point out that the article makes it sound like Microsoft conducted the test, and if that is the case I could see the test results being less trustworthy. Also the sample size was only 1000 people, which is really small.
Bing it On was what they called the campaign, that’s pretty funny.
Hey, you might be able to do a test like this today, as an impartial third party. The Cross Origin Policy might make it harder though, see this: https://web.archive.org/web/20230321113801/https://gigablast...
I could see this statistic combined with Bing’s market share being a reason why companies would decide not to try making a search engine, so you have a point there. Considering how terrible both search engines are though, I think it’s a dumb decision. We need a better search engine.
Uh, there is a global secret state level private enterprise looting the world and even conventional governments are there pwn?
You know, when China “hacked” the US telco infrastructure, that back door is actually owned by a private intelligence community enterprise that rents it back to the FBI the CIA and NSA.
These purchased all of this and more using post 9/11 “debt cards.”
Who else understands information is the next black gold and has Americas’ complicity to back up their thirst for more everything?
I like your username by the way. It sounds like the evil version of sun screen.
This new breed is uninhibited by state safeguards. And those tolerate them blindly for the govs enjoy outsourcing and plausible deniability.
I like to think I’m the good version of starscream.
Edit: oh, and they want to control search engines as they curate the catalog of nearly all internet accessible content.
If you cannot find it, it might as well not exist.
It is one of many information flow control strategies. There are so many.
If this is what is happening, why hasn’t anyone brought it to light already, especially with how many people would have been targeted so far?