When was the last time you used a search engine to find anything worthwhile? Even on a conceptual level they are a bad way to navigate the web and virtually every result page these days is muddled by algorithims built around marketing and spam. Search engines remove the interactive and community based nature of the internet. Remember when the only way to find sites was through word of mouth or spending hours procrastinating clicking on link after link? Today the average search result brings up a bunch of shit op eds and news articles sponsered by a company or just recyled press releases and reddit posts and its all set to get worse AI bullshit.
I agree. I enjoy browsing the DQN board specifically for looking through the links and videos posted there.
Google Images is getting worse by the day.
yandex and yandex images were nice But I fear they're gonna go downhill because of the sanctions and Russia's very own retarded laws
I find what I need using search engines. Works for me. 😉
Google has been unusable for at least a solid 8 years now. You'd have better luck searching forums, webrings, and using much more obscure search engines.
Fuck search engines. Just use bookmarks and save links. Here’s a decent list of actually good sites. I say decent because 4-ch is not on here
https://rentry.org/good-sites
>>7
Ironically had that link already bookmarked. Also I agree with your methodology. Search engines makes internet users boring and laaaaazzzzzzyyyy; with never finding what they really want anyways.
You need to use +"" and -"" modifiers a lot these days to avoid noise from AI generated garbage sites. Also need to use the big three base engines (Google, Bing, Yandex) to get the best results. The non big three based engines aren't really worth using most of the time, but smaller curated ones like wiby and marginalia can give interesting results sometimes, but are generally not worth using for general searches. Chinese search engines I haven't found useful, even though they have large datasets for a non big three engine. Then there's all the specialized search engines for torrents, ftps, files, images etc.
The overall searching experience could be better if a lot AI generated garbage was filtered out, but alas. I also fucking hate discord because it doesn't get indexed by search engines and houses a lot of hidden data.
agreed. replace your search engine with bookmarks and a bunch of links. there will always be those idiots who says this is inconveniant. but it forces you to actually think and use your mind instead of asking sheikh google for the fucking answer all the time. sure it simplifies the mental process but thats exactly the problem! search engines are why gen z are so retarded. they dont think or process anything they just search for shit and swallow it down like a cum drinking jav idol.
Search engines are good for when you have a specific problem to solve, or specific book / show to find info on. For other things, tags and catalogues are preferable.
>>7,8
Did you know in the early days of the Word Wide Web, people actually maintained public directories of links. The Yahoo website was originally a public directory of links.
>>14
Yes. I remember them. There was plenty of geocities pages as well as dedicated forums that had link directories aka webrings.
Ah the good old days where you actually had to look for stuff or ask someone. It was always fun finding a bunch of links and randomly clicking away only to stumble on something random or totally fucked up.
>>16
People have also seemed to lose a major fraction of their thinking skills when it comes to being online. They want all of these stupid algorithms to think of their content for them. They can't even do basic thought processes and want to just chum through life with a mundane prescence that's stale as shit. I definitely miss the days of hanging out with a bunch of my friends all sitting on our desktops exploring the web and dragging around our heavy ass CRT monitors just so all of us can do our own thing then later on we'd have a LAN party. Same when we decided to take over our local internet cafe just for RuneScape trolling in the wildy in the mid 2000s. Calling WoW players, "fucking faggots" and to meet us in the wildy if they were real men. Oh, how I miss the days of ultimate cringe. Even the times we all got kicked out for jacking off to hentai and having contests to see who could cum first to fanart of Misty and May's tits first while battling each other on our FireRed and LeafGreen games.
I hate it. The entire human species - any one of them who uses an internet connection - has been transformed into this docile, brainless consoomer. People now rely on an algorithm to tell them what music to listen to, what YouTube or TikTok video to watch, what TV series to start streaming this week, what to buy for groceries (Did you like that salted caramel ice cream last week? Well try this flavour this week! Would you like me to place an order?), what books to read, what to buy on Amazon even though they don't really need anything and so on.
So few people take effort to seek out something new and unheard of to them and take the time to discover it, then maybe finding more stuff from that. Nobody loads up SoulSeek or some other mp3 sharing program and some Discogs browser tabs and seeking out new music, they just have Spotify or some trash shuffle stuff for them that is similar to the same garbage they've had on shuffle for the last 6 months.
In 50 years nobody will know the joys of digging for new music at a store, scouring the shelves at a bookshop, downloading random pirated games to play, discovering a niche online community for something totally random you love. We'll have an entire generation of idiots that are perpetually online under this new internet now controlled by massive corporations. The wild west days so many of us grew up on are over. I feel like things like IRC, textboards and even forums are one of the last things remaining of the internet of the past. In time, they'll vanish and all we'll be stuck with is what some company sells us.
>>18
Your post made me feel incredibly sad and at the same time realizing just how different I truly am from the average person. I have always lived online as I did in the past. I never stopped web exploring as a kid going on 30 years ago. I don't rely on any type of algorithm for anything. Unless you consider it problematic that I do check into things I read on forums and other boards such as these for new content once and a while.
I've curated well over 7000 websites so I never have to use a search engine ever again. I've managed to go without one since sometime in 2015. Not counting fun stuff like wiby and other similar websites. I've been thinking about making a few webrings that people may find useful. I haven't managed a personal page for a little while now. Which is something I believe everyone who uses the internet should do. At least learn how to make a personal page, no matter how simplistic it may turn out. I felt happier when I was managing the few that I had made. Neocities makes this easier than ever for the average person. I go on there once and a while to check out the newer generations creations, I usually end up cracking a smile leaving me happy that there's at least still some out there who understand the fundamentals.
As far as the consumerism approach. I've never used anything like that. I've always relied on web scraping, torrenting, and/or other means of actually having my content downloaded to use whenever I want regardless of being online or offline.
>In 50 years
It's already happening today. It's getting increasingly hard to find physical media even in the thrift shops in my area. It's sad when you have a company like goodwill who would rather post stuff that was donated to them online to attempt to maximize profits eliminating the sole purpose of charity for lower price to people who may need it. Greed as corrupted this world. I'm glad that I push to find physical books for my child instead of some tablet or phone. Which I never will do. I can't mentally comprehend the mindset in giving a young child such devices in the first place. I find myself feeling waves of depression knowing that my child isn't going to have the quality of life as I did growing up. All I can do is really just try my best, make moments that are important, and pass down my knowledge.
>IRC, textboards, and forums of the last things remaining of the internet of the past
That is the truth. I think that's why despite my age I still gravitate to places like these. It's really the only places one can remain free and independent online.
>I've been thinking about making a few webrings that people may find useful.
You should! Even if it's niche and few people will see it, put it out there. Mirror it on a few places, be it your own website, a pastebin that doesn't expire, on textboards. Mirror it to multiple sites so that even if you stop updating it and move on, it can still be out there. It is up to us to preserve things online. As users - every one of us online - is like a librarian or archivist of the past, existing in a new world where we have a technology that would have been unfathomable just a few decades ago.
Information should be free. It was the entire point in the internet. If you have things you enjoy and archive and if you want to share it, do your best to get it out there and ensure it lives as long as it can.
>It's sad when you have a company like goodwill who would rather post stuff that was donated to them online to attempt to maximize profits eliminating the sole purpose of charity for lower price to people who may need it.
It's funny you say that. I worked at Goodwill part time many years ago when I needed some extra money. It was unbelievable how much cool stuff came in. They had a policy that anything of potential value was to be put off to the side so that it could be sold either in the glass display cases at the checkout or on their online auction website.
You know what I did instead? I'd price stuff as cheap as possible and put it on the shelves. Digital cameras that could have sold for 600 dollars? I put a 10 dollar price sticker on it. Old video game consoles? I put a 15 dollar sticker on it. A cool old 486 computer (that may or may not have even worked)? A 5 dollar sticker. A sealed pack of old floppy's? I'd slap a 50 cent sticker on those. Anything cool or retro I said to myself: fuck their auction. I know people want this. Guys like Lazy Game Reviews who scour old thrift stores for neat stuff. Totally unknown dudes who just want to check out what is in the store that day...then happen to find a VIC-20 with an 8 dollar sticker on it. I made sure to give people good deals.
But on the other hand, we'd have a lot of staff that didn't know anything about old products. The way Goodwill and similar stores work is that stuff gets donated (or trucked in from other donation centres) and minimum wage staff look through it for anything of value. There were sooooo many nice electronic products that would just get thrown into the scrap bins that would have been worth a lot of money or more importantly give people some enjoyment. All because you've got some high school kid or a dude with downs syndrome - basically anyone clueless - looking through electronic donations on a certain day and deeming it to all be garbage. They'd think...oh okay a Bluray player, nice. A working lamp, nice. An old yellow'd Amiga 1000? Ah this is older than me, must be useless - then it gets literally thrown into a giant box that gets sent off to get sold for e-waste recycling.
I could write so much more about it, but that sums it up. They get a lot of great stuff often by people clearing out their grandparents basement or dead fathers storage locker, then dumping it all here, not realizing they have some great stuff. Anyway, I did my best to make sure normal shoppers had a chance to get something super retro and neat. Even if it was just a cool old midcentury calculator or lamp. I think they're a bit more strict these days, though, in how they vet donations so they can auction off anything of potential value.