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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while. When it's new, it's scary and bad. I look forward to being 90 and reading about people wistfully remembering the simpler and more cultured bygone days of smartphones and Facebook.

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While I agree with your basic point, there's something to be said about anonymously searching for information in a non-dynamic fashion (that is, the catalogue is exactly the same for everyone - it doesn't rearrange itself based on your profile)

I love technology and all it brings us, but I find browsing in a good bookstore often more helpful than Amazon's recommendations or GoodReads or what have you. And the best part is, no one knows what I'm searching for - it's not stored forever in a database of my "preferences". (Yes, I know that bookstores save data on books that I buy, but Amazon et al track every click regardless of purchase)

That's a good point. Though there's no reason a computerized system couldn't do that, most of them just don't. Also I don't think electronic catalogs replace human recommendations, just the card system.

With a card catalog, the fact that the system does not do that is obvious to the user.

I concur with this - Amazon or other mainstream retailers are great if you know what you're after, and Amazon's recommendation engine is not bad. But many of my most valuable literary or intellectual discoveries have come from aimless browsing, where I was in search of something interesting to read but with little advance conception of what. I bought Godel, Escher, Bach with no awareness of what it was about because I'd noticed it lurking in several window displays and one day found a copy that had been misplaced in the sci-fi section. I figure that if a book is following you around you should probably read it, an attitude that has served me well so far.

A huge advantage of libraries in general is that they are a curated collection of books on every topic. Typically the quality you get on any topic will be higher than the average new book.

Sometimes you can just walk through the library looking for something to read.

The big win from ai won't be self driving cars, it will be scaleable curation. Google search was amazing, but it's kind of fast food information. Getting high quality information and the halo of related concepts, like you find in a cool library will be another information revolution. Current search raises the lower bound, future search raises the upper bound.

This is so true.

On HN a few months ago I came across someone claiming that web search was fine before Google and the only reason Google got popular was superior marketing.

I found that so completely shocking to me that someone didn't remember how bad it was. Then I realised that was nearly 20 years ago, and it was really only 7 years or so when search was bad.

I'd never felt so old before.

I can't be the only person to remember using search aggregators (aka "meta search engines") because every individual search engine was so bad and incomplete on its own, especially outside the US.

The "major" search engines before Google were Yahoo and Altavista, who were too busy trying to sell you a foggy concept of being "the Internet's start page" to be of any practical use when you actually wanted to find something specific. And of course plenty of people were stuck in their own ridiculous AOL microcosm.

Not only were the search engines lackluster and incomplete, the search results were also simply not very relevant. Often you'd only get good results because there simply wasn't enough content indexed for your queries to be in any way ambiguous but good luck if you were looking for anything you couldn't pin down to one or two very explicit search terms.

Kids these days don't know how good they have it with their Googles and their smartpads.

Oh yeah, before Google came along I used Metacrawler, which would search about 8 search engines and compiled the results. It was a big improvement over Webcrawler, which I had used previously. Searching was really bad back then compared to now. I remember having to wade through lots of irrelevant search results to find what I wanted.

The moment I discovered Google in early 2000, I dumped Metacrawler and never went back.

I remember using Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Excite, DogPile, and a few others. I also used some meta search engines but I can't remember them.

But I do remember using Copernic.It was a meta search engine application. You had to install this one.

To a lot of us there was a period where it felt like Google was inferior because while it was good, if you understood your space and knew which terms to carefully include/exclude in the search using search operators with Altavista for example, you'd be likely to get a better result. For a while.

But that was based on a web where the amount of information was "small" and of searching within small bubbles we knew well, and spending a lot of time refining searches.

What "made" Google was first making search "good enough" that casual searches would return good results without spending time tuning inclusion/exclusion or figuring out which terms were used for a given subject first. Suddenly search "worked" for a lot of people and instances where it didn't work before, and for a rapidly growing internet population that made figuring out how to make an engine like Altavista work totally pointless.

Altavista was "better" once you had a hyperspecialised set of skills around using Altavista. But that too only lasted until Google had improved their algorithms a bit more combined with people starting to pay attention to SEO. Out went the last niches where the old-style engines could compete.

I used altavista from when it was altavista.digital.com. The only time I remember it being better than Google was when Google only spidered the Stanford domain, and slightly later if you knew the page title you were looking for.

Also if you wanted Usenet search before DejaNews.

Note that I didn't write that it was better in general. It was briefly better for the subset of users that knew exactly what to search for in their specific niches, until e.g. people got used to SEO and the like.

If you knew from past experience and searches that most people used term X when they wrote about Y, Altavista gave you more precise tools to narrow your search.

The whole point being that a subset of users were blinded by our in depth experience with Altavista into not seeing the advantages of Google as early on - we knew exactly how to work around the limitations.

The problem for Altavista, and advantage for Google, is that this doesn't scale. It takes a lot of effort to expand this to learning how to search in any new subject, and that effort grows dramatically as the amount of indexed pages increases and it becomes harder to find terms that act as good filters. It was only viable for a short period of time when the web was small and most people didn't think about SEO, and as long as we were still conditioned to treat a search engine as something you used for things you couldn't e.g. find in a directory.

The inverse of course is to remember that new technology is hot, cutting edge, and cool... thus good! Old technology is just tech that has managed to solve problems for years, survived many users, grown through numerous changes in application and expectation, and has an established base of understanding and knowledge both within its very implementation as well as those who work with and on it. I look backward on the 40+ years of predictions to the ends of paper, internal combustion, hydrocarbon fuels, and general ignorance since I've been reading and chuckle remembering the hubris of those who were certain the hot new thing would clearly displace older technology simply because something was new.

>Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while.

The funny thing about that is Facebook was good when it was new and has been getting steadily worse.

> Remember, technology is only good after it's old and been around for a while. When it's new, it's scary and bad.

I'm not sure it's that simple. On the subject of libraries in particular, Z39.50 is thirty years old now, and it's still scary and bad.

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