Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook.
When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.
I'm beginning to think that there is a niche for a peculiar kind of a search engine. A search engine for static almost-none to none JavaScript pages. It would penalize pages for ad-network usage.
I would really like to not have in search results most sites that try to monetize on my attention. I want raw facts and opinions. No click-bait to grab my attention or feed my internal cave man with rage. No ad-networks or data extraction operations. Just pages put there by people that want to share knowledge and ideas. I mostly find it on pages that lack ads and often are pure HTML - no CSS and no JS. At least in areas that interest me.
Maybe there is a place for a search engine that would index only pages like that? It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.
I had that feeling of discovering Internet again when I used tor and surfed hidden websites for the first time and read beginner's wikis, opinions pieces such as The Matrix, etc.
I am not interested in most of the "deep web" but what you say sounds interesting. Could you please provide link to that Matrix thing? And other pieces you found interesting?
http://zqktlwi4fecvo6ri.onion/wiki/index.php/Main_Page is the wiki I stumbled upon when I first accessed hidden websites, the matrix rant is the first link, but it's not in the form of what I remember (PS: I do not endorse the content, it's mostly a critic of our society's mechanisms).
> It certainly would be easier than competing with Google on indexing whole of the attention-whoring Internet.
Probably not, actually; the kind of pages you describe would almost always be leaf nodes on the web graph, so your spider would need to walk "through" the attention-whoring parts to get to them, whether you kept records of doing so or not. (And it'd be very inefficient to not.)
I don't know about that - I find that I get a lot of my information from sites that have user generated content such as Medium, reddit, and of course HN. I think it would be extremely hard to fit in sources like that to your search engine without letting in what I will admit is garbage. Would be very cool if it did manage to though!
When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.
...and if you actually try to search for more obscure/"fringe" subjects/phrases with Google, you either get no results (despite knowing that there are still active sites with those phrases), or it starts thinking you're a bot sending "automated queries" and blocking you for a while (not even giving you the option of completing a CAPTCHA.)
The first time that happened to me, which was within this year, was my realisation that Google had truly changed, and not in a good way.
I've sort of had this same experience myself. The quality of links for obscure topics is nowhere near as good as it used to be. It's harder and harder to find the topics I know exist, sometimes they're buried under lots of irrelevant results, or results I know about aren't there at all. I've not experienced the 'bot' throttling to my knowledge, but it certainly feels like they're trying to do some kind of language translation for me when I want explicit results. I'm not convinced Advanced search isn't doing similar translations either
Don't confuse people's tendency to no longer bother looking past the top of the first page of Google with the internet somehow shrinking into whatever fits those slots. Of course the most popular sites now dominate the top of Google's search results, but Google isn't the internet any more than Facebook is.
The breadth and depth of information on the web now vastly surpasses what was available in 1994. Youtube and other video and music streaming sites have provided a media revolution to compare with the transition from radio to television. Social media, whatever its drawbacks are, allows people to communicate and collaborate far more personally than email or basic chatrooms would have.
And let's not even get into the ways that Javascript, HTML5 and Webassembly have and will transform the web into a platform in which virtual machines will converge to becoming just another content type. I know people here like to rend their garments and scream Javascript Delenda Est[0] into the void and just hope everything that happened to the web in the last 20 years just goes away, but the day is coming where all archived and obsolete code will have a URL endpoint that bootstraps a VM and runs it. The best the web of 1994 could do is file downloads, maybe Java applets and flash.
Sometimes the way people here seem to dismiss the modern web is baffling. I get it, but look at it from the point of view of the mainstream web user. The web offers access to so much more than would even have been possible in 1994, and lets people interact with one another on a much more direct and complex level.
Yes, the added richness and depth comes with a lot of baggage, but its undeniably there.
The really bonus of the internet of old was that text was most of its content. Today you have video, pictures, emojys and music and - in my opinnion it reduces the experience.
Maybe at the fringes, but I feel that the internet today, with my emphasis being on the "inter" (different) "net" (networks) part of it, is far less deeper or richer than before. What we basically have reduced to are a bunch of siloed netowrks such as Facebook.
When I searched for something when Google first came out I got a mix of results from a variety of sites I had never heard about. Today it's basically Wikipedia at the top, with results from the same list of about 3-4 sites depending on the topic of what I searched for.