alt Hacker NewsI feel like soon there won’t even be a point having a search engine since almost the entire internet will be useless AI slop.
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A search engine doesn't have to search the entire internet. Most of them are extremely opinionated about what they index.
The old internet is still there. It hasn‘t gone away; it‘s just undiscoverable with ad-based search. The more slop there is, the more necessary it is to have good search engines.
Seriously though. Five years ago Google already became unusable without "site:reddit.com" which is actually hilarious for a search engine that's supposed to search the entire internet. Nowadays reddit is also shit, which means that the only use case for me to use Google or any search engine is to find products that for some reason I don't want to buy on Amazon.
Internet isn't a global village, it's a global ghetto, and it's becoming increasingly true that the only way not to lose is not to play.
It's as though full-text search of websites you've never heard of was a mistake :)
PageRank wouldn't exist without webrings, directories, and forums you could only search individually, and we thrived on that Internet.
Welcome back, ye olde Internet.