Why there’s so little left of the early internet

In all fairness, only some TV is like that and TBH I have a pretty limited appetite for highly-serialized complex shows that require a lot of attention and focus. The ones I like I really like. They're just not a daily diet for me.

The were miniseries back in the day. But they were an exception that required really driving a big audience to TV on a schedule.

>>I much prefer what TV has become, to the point where I now prefer the medium over feature length films...something I never would have expected 20 years ago.

Same here (Although, I'm not sure we should continue to call it TV since a lot of us are no longer consuming this content on a TV but rather via streaming services on a computer device. Also, a lot of new serialized content is created specifically for streaming services and not TV. TV, the way we knew it, is dead , in my opinion.)

It is way more enjoyable to watch a long sci-fi series in one go than to watch a single two hour film. The plots and characters have more time to develop in a series. It is in essence a really long film. Almost like reading a really good book.

Unfortunately a lot of old TV shows were still lost. It can be similarly difficult to find old youtube videos that aren't there anymore. It can take some archeology on archive.org to find a working copy of a video.

there were a lot of years between the introduction of TV, and betamax.

You're assuming VCRs existed when I was growing up :-) I didn't have a VCR until I was about 30.

Its early use of the serial format is one of the big reasons Star Blazers is still a notable anime. That, and the excellent remake _Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199_.

Agreed that it's no great crime. And of course, I'm missing out on all kinds of stuff. Not because I'm too busy with ever evolving memes to pay attention, I hope.

The mentality that only today matters, that the past is old and boring, that only the "ever evolving" should grasp your attention, and that who cares if what interests you today will exist tomorrow is distinctly a teenager's mentality.

It's something adults usually -- but not always, of course -- grow out of.

This is no criticism, by the way. It's ok that teenagers think and feel this way. It's also expected that they grow out of it as they mature and become adults.

Older dude checking in. I threw out my Divx collection about 10 years ago. I have precious little time to spend watching 2-hour films, and I recognize that the number of films I will watch before I die is on the order of maybe 300. When I do get a chance to watch a film, I want the experience to be as great as it possibly can be. I want as high a resolution as I can get with the best color. Compared to 4k HDR stuff available today, the Divx stuff looks like total shit. I have grown to despise my fellow human beings in groups larger than about 7, so I've built a home theater where I can watch a movie without having to deal with the bullshit that is the general public. I'll invite 4 or 5 of my friends over on occasion. Specifically, the ones who respect my rules of watching a movie. No talking, no phones, that sort of thing. I'll buy a Blu-ray disc brand new so I don't have to worry about random scratches or whatever from previous renters. I don't stream because I no longer tolerate any of the bullshit that happens half the time, like random degradation from the service resulting in pixelation or pauses.

For music, I just subscribe to a streaming music service where I can download ("pin") stuff to my phone. Mainly because it's ridiculously cheap and convenient. I don't care about "owning" music, like it could somehow forever "go away" and I'd be sitting in the corner of my basement crying about how I can't listen to such-and-such a song any more. But honestly I'm more likely to listen to audiobooks these days, which I do immediately strip the DRM from and store separately on my phone.

When I go on vacation, I take a pathologically small number of photos, and I only take them on my phone. I can't be bothered with lugging around a huge lens and camera body everywhere I go when I'm trying to experience some place new. Whenever I show the photos to people, they often say, "Wow! What camera did you take these with??" And I say, "A used Pixel 2."

I had a hard time letting go of my old digital packrat stuff too. In fact I never fully let go.

Fortunately, thanks to modern storage capacities, I was able to compromise with myself. I stopped packratting new stuff. And the old stuff fits on a single hard drive now. I have a copy of that drive at my brother's place in case something happens to this one.

I'm 99% sure I'll never watch any of that stuff, but a single offline HDD isn't expensive and isn't really taking up much space in my life, so it was a good compromise for me.

I think there really is something to an abundance mentality.

My dad used to hoard, of all things, toilet paper. Why? He grew up in WW2 Philippines, had his house bombed and had to hike up into the mountains where they would shit in the river and wipe their butt with stones.

The idea seems crazy to me and my wife, as does my Taiwanese-born in-laws' predilection toward hoarding food. But we grew up in a world where you can always go to Costco and get more. That wasn't the case even as recently as our parents' generation.

Similarly, today's teens are growing up in a world where you can always go to YouTube or Netflix and get more media, or Google and get more information. The idea that these might be scarce resources and you might need a personal collection, just in case the Internet gets shut off, is as foreign to them as the idea of running out of toilet paper is to me.

As far as pictures go, I've learned to be ruthless with the delete button and only keep photos that I really care about. Mostly, those are the ones with people in them, that record a meaningful moment in history, or with actually interesting subjects. Photography is somewhat of a hobby for me, so I still take a lot of photos, but I'm quick to delete them.

This has the side effect that I can store my entire photo collection (10 years/60 GB) on my phone's SD card where they are easily accessible. This has been valuable, because I refer back to photos I've taken years ago surprisingly often.

I threw out my huge binder of burned CDs (and later DVDs) too. I also threw out all my VHS tapes of my favorite shows that I recorded off the TV in the 90s.

I realized I really don't need to hoard bad video quality anime series'; there's more media that I can realistically consume in a lifetime.

I have a large and ever-growing (> 100,000) photo collection that isn’t particularly well curated, and I have worried for years that I’m accumulating too many pictures at too low a signal:noise ratio. But now I actually think that I’ll be able to hold out for machine learning to come along and help me get more value out of it. Apple and Google are now good at finding faces, and soon enough I imagine they’ll have pretty good algorithms from sorting good photos from bad ones.

Sometimes you really can just ignore a problem long enough until someone else solves it for you.

I save all my photos and videos I take, I don't feel like it's that much, but still a good 700gb. I personally love having it, and look at it at least a couple of times a year. I just love having access to all this footage. Last week for example we were talking about how our backyard used to look like with my daughter. I was able to pull out old footage of our backyard, and even a video of a tractor cleaning up our backyard. It's nothing vital, but it was very nice for me to be able to look at it again. I'll keep organizing and keeping old photos and videos.

I do agree that mp3 and movies are a bit useless. I still have a 1TB or 500gb drive somewhere full of movies. I probably didn't boot it up in the past 5 years.

The one thing I regret not keeping, is all my projects since I was a kid. I programmed a lot of things between age 10-15. Video games, created art on paint and photoshop. All that is gone. I wish I could access it even if I know it wouldn't be good quality stuff.

> A lot of comic strips are a product of their time

Yes, and even those are worth reading. Newer is not better.

I get what you're saying - Doonesbury is maybe a good example of one that you really had to be there. On the other hand a lot of the classics that do have a time based cultural context can still be very funny.

Take Asterix where a lot of characters wore the faces of contemporary celebrities or politicians, but that was a secondary joke so they still maintain their appeal. The Simpsons and South Park also have a lot of cultural references but the early seasons are every bit as funny now. Classics like Marge vs the Monorail still hold up as the core theme is one that keeps repeating every generation, but a guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy wont mean anything to a new audience.

> But Calvin and Hobbes is even more accessible now than it was when I was a teenager in the mid to late 80s.

Not if, like the teenager in the original post, you don't have "a lot of time to care about the old stuff" because of ever evolving memes and conversations.

For people who simply don't have the time or don't care, it doesn't matter whether Calving & Hobbes is readily available or not.

Is there anything you deeply care about currently? Are you optimistic everything in the future brings improvement?

While it may seem irrational for people to pine for past things like internet sites/services, it is not the service itself, but the experience and environment it was consumed in.

I guarantee you will pine for some things in your future, because some experiences or parts of your environment now are likely better than similar things at a future point.

I'd imagine that a body of content that's largely from the pre-ecommerce internet isn't of any use to Google.

I haven't looked in a while, but for a long time, the single most-voted-for bug in Google's public bug tracker was "give me some API access to the message content in Google Groups."

Ironically, there is already a very simple API mechanism that could have been used to provide exactly all the information people wanted... NNTP. All Google would have to do is provide an NNTP server endpoint to Google Groups (even beyond its Usenet mirror). It's not even that hard to write an NNTP server: it's probably the easiest server to implement of POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and NNTP.

As soon as spam started hitting USENET there really was no way to shut it down. The entire system was held together by "netiqette" and when that died off during the Eternal September, it was only a matter of time before it collapsed.

>(If you explained the entire internet to an alien, and then told them that Google aren't the ones running the Internet Archive, they'd say "Seriously?")

+1000

Mind you. At some level, I'm happier that it's a non-profit pursuing this as its mission rather than Google. But, given the vast amounts of money that Google spends on all sorts of things, I don't really grok the mindset that doesn't really prioritize the preservation of information--and the organization of that information--as at least a sideline.

There are admittedly growing headwinds, especially in the case of Europe, about what information can be preserved, but that hasn't really been a big issue until recently.

Thank God Google isn't running the Internet Archive. Everyone should donate to them so they can remain an independent nonprofit.

Does Google allow the Internet Archive to archive all of its YouTube videos?

It says "organize", not "preserve". They are organizing information following the Mary Kondo method.

> Google Search and Maps are two inventions that are so insanely useful, they may standalone be responsible for decades of faster progress.

I don't know about this. Google Search was a great improvement in ranking by relevance, but an important invention itself? As for maps: as far as I'm aware, Google Maps was "just" a combination of two existing technologies - online maps and car navigation systems. They launched Maps in 2005, even Germany had online maps by 2000. Granted, they didn't look as good as Google's and the UX was inferior, but it wasn't a horses vs cars situation imho.

> To "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

They still do a few things like that, very occasionally. When they got rid of Freebase (notice a pattern?) they did preserve that data and it was used to seed Wikidata, which now in turn feeds their "SERP boxes". But I absolutely agree that there's zero focus otherwise on that core enabler of their business-- they're just coasting on their earlier (very substantial) efforts, and managing to stay afloat somehow.

> If you explained the entire internet to an alien, and then told them that Google aren't the ones running the Internet Archive, they'd say "Seriously?"

They are running an internet archive. That's what their cache is. There's more than one internet archive; why would Google necessarily be running all of them?

Yeah, their new motto might more accurately be stated as "to organize the world's information, to feed it into our machine learning models, and to throw away anything we deem unprofitable."

Internet Archive has a clear mission and pure motives though. As an independent non-profit they are free from “business” motivations.

> I mean don't get me wrong. Google Search and Maps are two inventions that are so insanely useful, they may standalone be responsible for decades of faster progress

I'm wondering if I'm the only one finding Google Search lacking lately. Increasingly, its search results are seriously out of date and linking to dead and/or ad-heavy sites. I've come to use DDG and, recently, Startpage.com more than Google Search.

Well, sure, but I was still pretty immature 25 years ago. And for younger people, the norms are shifting so rapidly that it's not certain that something posted in jest today won't be considered career-ending heresy in five years.

This is the real reason the internet isn't nearly as interesting as it once was. The concept of 'thinking out loud' that I grew up with is nearly dead.

That's your choice. I prefer to use a different username on each site to make it more complicated to connect the dots.

>Or don't post things that you'd be embarrassed to be associated with?

I can't predict what will be embarrassing or harmful for me to be associated with in ten years. The only way to be (sort of) sure would be to censor everything I say on the internet to be as inoffensive as possible to everyone, which would suck.

From pg's excellent <http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html >:

> Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told[....]

> The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts.

I actually convinced the guy who founded Deja News to delete most of my early posts in 1996. They still lived on in some quotes, though.

Which doesn’t help if anyone replied to them.

Unfortunately we often don’t know that we’ll regret something when we do it.

I posted a lot of crap on Usenet. While nothing that could be held against me, there were definitely a number of nerd wars I engaged in back in 1992.

I take an entirely different approach: My name is basically a globally-unique identifier to me, and most of my aliases are probably easily traced back to me, so I am forced to conduct all of my online business with the threat of being "found out"

I split the difference. My name namrog84 Looks like a pseudonym and number from previous era.

However it's my last name backwards. Gorman. And I was born in 84 so it's not just a random throw away. Also namrog without number is often taken.

So i still use it professionally because it's still closely related to my identity. Yet majority of people would never know if they didn't know my name.

> That must be scary for upcoming generations.

Not on long time scale, I think. Services will disappear, disks will be reformatted, bit-rot will erode archives.

It's a lot better now. In the past we had usenet, public forever. Now our wall gardens give ability to share semi privately and hide most info that hasn't been leaked yet.

> Online communication from 1970 to 1995 was almost completely public, archived indefinitely.

Only if one thinks that Usenet is all that there was. It wasn't.

99.999+% of history has been lost, and that's OK. The modern fetish of archiving everything is not necessary or healthy.

Most communication throughout history has been ephemeral, and lost as soon as the people relevant died without relaying it to someone else.

Consider the 1800s, where much of our understanding of the attitudes of the day comes from newspapers and archived letters. Then consider how many more were discarded once they had served their purpose.

Today it's possible to archive all of that ephemeral information, but it has never been necessary.

Usenet, for example, was thought to be ephemeral because at best you had a few months worth of posts archived on your server and maybe your local machine, so if you said something boneheaded, it was going to naturally fall off the internet sooner rather than later. As it turns out, that was an incorrect view of the world.

Most forums are treated by their users the same way; a place for people to meet and talk about things in quasi-realtime, but not to archive those discussions for all time. Of course, as it turns out, those discussions are archived for all time, or until the forum closes or has a catastrophic data loss (e.g. this one we're on now).

Interesting perspective. With regard to the historical value, though, I think that the volume of information cheapens the value of most of it. The kinds of things that move people and events so that future generations can understand what happened are still preserved -- maybe not all the details, but enough. Of course, there could be some great catastrophe that wipes out most of the collective memory, but the broad outlines are still there and will continue to be there in some form, because ultimately the really important memories are preserved in the minds of those who were affected by them and passed along in some form to the next generation.

So, the burning of the library at Alexandria was a catastrophe for our understanding of ancient civilization, but enough was preserved that we still have what is essentially a Greco-Roman understanding and practice of government, philosophy, history, etc.

Closer to our day, I remember things that were told to me about events that happened over 100 years ago by people who lived through them or who knew people who lived through them. For example, my mom has told me about how her Uncle Henry wheezed when she was a kid in the 30s because he was exposed to chemical warfare in the trenches of France during the Great War. My dad's stories of growing up on a farm during the Depression and World War II likewise tie in nicely with things I have read about the larger events at the time; e.g., he once mentioned how they received extra gas ration stamps once they bought a tractor because they were farmers producing food needed for the war effort. (They farmed with horses until 1942.)

So I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what life was like for my parents and grandparents because of what they told me. Do I have anything like a complete record of it? No, but I don't need it. Do my children need it? Sure, but they don't really understand what actual Nazis were because that word has been misused and misapplied ever since Gore Vidal used that tactic to "win" an argument with William F. Buckley 50 years ago. And I can tell them about that and why it's important, but it doesn't seem to register because they were never taught any details of what happened in the 30s in Europe, and don't really have a sense of what that generation suffered through as a consequence of the toxic ideologies that flourished during that era.

So please forgive me, but while long posts like this on the internet might be interesting to a tiny percentage of us, for most of the people who live in the future they will at the very best be reduced to a one-sentence quote by some future Ken Burns-like documentarian read by some future Morgan Freeman-like actor.

Awesome comment. I feel as you do, and believe that early culture, those wide ranging thoughts have more value than we might realize right now.

A global sense of US. That is what it was. People becoming aware, the world smaller...

I do not know the answer either, other than I too oppose Real Names type efforts.

Just wanted to say that I agree with your sentiment. It's supremely aggravating to browse eg. Reddit and find some potentially interesting posts wiped out by some memory-erasing bot. And it is amazing how much we managed to preserve from historical periods, despite (as siblings point out) the theoretical ephemerality of information. I think it is important for subsequent generations to be able to study social phenomena of the past, and at least have a chance to be wiser. We could move beyond anecdotes, speculation and quasi-historical garbage, as "decline of America mimics decline of the Roman empire" meme regularly popping out in newspapers and such.

From my experience people are fascinated when they find some saved communication/memorabilia from years back, and the only downside for them is the fear of being judged. The best dream situation would be where you can have changable identities, but there is an incentive to build respect for them over time (like on HN or Reddit), and there is a strong social convention that you could not be in any way harassed for what you said with such identity. You can also change it, like a mask (maybe in some minimal intervals), and it will be respected. Maybe also you can't refer to anyone's extra-online identity, and it concerns also people from the outside unless they're public figures.

Or, that you can freely say anything under your real name under some online circumstances. It would be similar to carnival in traditional culture, with role reversal, rule suspension and all that. Although for this to work it should have an aura of unseriousness and inherent lack of consequence for the normal reality.

I know what total anonymity with no continual identity leads to (vide *chans), but it is not even what we are talking about here. We could do better with some better social conventions, I think. Ie. have good amounts of both freedom and historical preservation.

I'd be really interested to hear some of your techniques for finding these interesting things in the actual archive. How do you find stuff, do you have to know what your looking for and search by exact text match?

You may or may not have the rights to post it yourself online, but very few pubs are going to have a problem with you keeping your own copies for personal use.

> I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it.

While you have it - for "us" it is "effectively gone" - unless you uploaded it somewhere.

In the future, after you die, it may become "absolutely gone" - as your relatives or whomever likely won't care, and will discard it.

Unless you make some effort to preserve it. Most people don't - they never did; it was always left up to future people to do so.

For instance, my mom and dad saved a ton of old photos and letters between them, many while he was in the service during the Vietnam War. My mom saved them - but not in a great way. She basically put them all in a box, then that inside a trash bag, and we found it in my old childhood home after both she and my had passed away. So I saved them.

But - unless I scan them - they will be gone forever. In a sense, though, that's ok - because they were never meant to be public anyhow.

But for stuff on the internet - it was public; it was most likely meant to be public. But if you save it personally, then the site or whatever goes away, what the public had is gone. Things like that didn't really happen in the past - I mean, they did - but there was always the possibility of recovery in the future.

More than a few times was something thought "lost forever" - only to be recovered; it found hidden away somewhere, or buried in some dusty archive in a back room of a basement storage area at a university or something. Sometimes found inside a wall.

But the digital? That is rare indeed. Even precious artifacts like tapes and manuals from times past get thrown out all the time, usually by relatives of some passed on engineer, often by their widows, as "so much of this old junk".

Occasionally, though, it gets saved (usually by bitsavers) - and if we are really lucky, it gets scanned or pulled from the tapes - old archives of code, sometimes of other stuff...

But we lose more than we save.

I'm just rambling now - this kind of thing, this loss of our computing history in general (it's more than just "the early internet" - we've lost and thrown away so much of our "early computing" history, it's not funny)...

Think about the inventions that have changed humanity in radical ways, that have altered our society greatly: The steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, etc. How many museums and such are there that celebrate, archive, and curate information about them?

The computer?

How many museums are there for it in comparison?

The difference is stark. A thought I just now had is that I wonder if it is like this, because the computer represents such a different "threat" to humans - that is, it's the closest we've come to a representation of "us" - our minds. And - as it becomes more tightly integrated into our society, if not our body collective (and literal) - if we unconsciously seek to marginalize it due to fear in some manner; fear of the other? fear of the artificial? fear of the usurper? Maybe we seek to forget what we have wrought?

I think it's kind of insulting to say that. More realistically, maintaining things in the Google environment has a cost- the products are always changing, so just keeping an existing system running well takes a ton of time, and that time comes at the cost of launching new features. Realistically, usenet search results never represented a huge amount of traffic, and traffic is what gets attention at google.

A random zoology department somewhere in Canada??!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer

That's like saying seismo was a random nuclear warhead detonation monitoring facility somewhere in Northern Virginia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Adams_(Internet_pioneer)

If utzoo was involved, then they probably mounted a scratch monkey, at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey

https://edp.org/monkey.htm

Here's the story: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/

One of the interesting points the story brings up is that you never know what future people will care about. In this case cultural and political discussions are typically more interesting than arcana about bug fixes in long ago systems.

Is it hosted anywhere, or just in a vault?

I wonder if we could get Kibo to show up.

I wish they'd hand the data off to some group that actually would do something with it, like the internet archive.

Let me guess, you didn't provide references because the sites predicting the growth of the internet were not archived? :-)

From wiki... Alex Tew's Calm company as of February of 2019, was valued at $1 billion.

[Wow]

Desktop isn't dead, neither is (by extension) laptop.

Actually, PC sales increases in 2018.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/13/17567760/pc-sales-growth-...

All those things are dead, and what's worse, replaced by devices whose primary focus is consumption rather than ceation

This was my point, though you put it much more articulately. People used to make websites because they were enthusiastic about The Smashing Pumpkins, Fight Club, or their EverQuest guild. Now they make sites for a business. Business ruined eBay, and then it spread to the rest of the web. If you have a passion you want to building for, you have to accept a terms of service of a big platform and build with their tools. It might be easier, but it sure has been less fun to view.

> free webspace is dead

Nope, it's better than ever. You have non-profit providers like https://neocities.org/, regular shared hosting with free plans, and stuff like Github pages and Netlify for those with a bit more tech skills.

Way better than the times when you had Geocities and such injecting ads into your site.

> the desktop is dead (the laptop close behind it)

No need for those to build a website. Any cheap Android phone can do it.

> ftp is dead

Nope, the previously mentioned shared hosting providers still offer it.

> HTML is much more complex (e.g. responsive design)

Old-school HTML pretty much works the same, and is actually quite fine on both desktop and mobile screens.

--

Frankly, I don't think the problem is that making your own site has gotten any harder, it's that there was no FB/IG back then. Had there been FB pages from the start of the web, you'd probably would have never seen so many custom sites in the first place.

Half of those you call dead (desktop, ftp, simple html) are things i use all the time :-P. And i'm sure free webspace isn't dead as i used one about 3 years ago which was the first hit on google among many and i doubt all of them vanished so fast.

I know exactly what you mean - when I said rich content though I was talking more about images, animations, video, games. In the early web over a 28.8k (or slower!) modem you'd have to make every non-text asset count and compress it (3-phase loading jpegs, anyone?), now you can put 10Mb of javascript executable in there and no one bats an eye.

Note that a lot of people in the 90s used WYSIWYG editors, both Netscape Gold (later Communicator) and Internet Explorer (as of Windows 98) came with WYSIWYG editors (Composer and Frontpage Express respectively). Personally i had my own site since the mid-90s (initially on Geocities, later on Tripod) and always used WYSIWYG editors (initially Netscape Composer, later Frontpage Express and after that Mozilla Composer) and AFAIK most people i know used and most oldschool sites i remember were made using such editors.

TBH i never understood, even at the time, the point of writing static pages by hand (i remember even proud web buttons like "Made in Notepad" :-P) - the main explanation i was given was that the WYSIWYG editors created messy code, but to me that never sounded like a good reason since the entire purpose of such an editor is to not have to bother with the code.

I only started making sites by hand when i got into (classic) ASP (i made single pages before, but mostly for javascript demos or learning HTML and the like) and later PHP. Even then, the first time i used ASP was for a hobby site i worked on with some friends over the net about (point and click) adventure games where we'd put articles and such and the articles themselves were written in Frontpage Express for formatting and such (with the code just copy/pasted into a textarea i had in the "admin" section :-P).

I'm still using Seamonkey Composer and Frontpage Express (well, more the latter than the former since i'm not using Seamonkey much anymore whereas the latter is just a 1.5MB zip file i carry on my external hard disk that works out of the box anywhere) for very simple pages like [0], [1] and [2]. Although my "bigger" sites (that is, sites with more than a couple of pages and a need for a theme) are made using custom generators (usually in Free Pascal or Python).

And FWIW one of my favorite software that isn't developed anymore is Apple's iWeb - i haven't seen a tool as easy to use for making static sites as this one. Sadly Apple cares much less than Microsoft ever did about backwards compatibility and i'm certain my copy of iWeb will stop working soon (and there isn't any Wine equivalent to fall back on whereas in the unlikely even that old Windows programs stop working, i can still use them via Wine) so after Apple abandoned it, i stopped using it myself.

[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/

[1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/

[2] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/ol/

Duck Duck Go has a similar problem for cloud and thrush, but if you click the “meanings” tab, it lets you switch results over to what you meant, and then gives decent results.

More broadly, DDG implements UI features that allow users to clarify their intent, while Google focuses on using machine learning to infer intent.

When things go sideways, this means DDG empowers users, and google overrides them.

Disclaimer: I switched away from google search years ago, and now I find its user interface completely baffling.

Maybe I just don’t know how to use it any more, and there is some override I’ve overlooked.

Also, I’m kind of shocked by how many corporate logos and spam links fly by when I scroll down the Google results for “cloud”. It feels like the 90’s internet before animated gifs and the blink tag were invented.

In fairness to google, ddg has a similar number of logos, but they’re each approximately the size of one normal sized character, not one third the width of the screen like in google.

But are relevance and popularity not related? If more people are using Google to learn about cloud computing than the clouds in the sky, I’d hazard that that would make cloud computing the more relevant result, in terms of what Google sees anyway.

It’s tricky, though, because I’d say that the clouds in the sky are more relevant to humanity as a whole. Not everyone cares about or needs to think about cloud computing.

It's even worse than that - it also appears to learn synonyms from popular usage, even when it is incorrect or misleading.

For example, when it comes to firearms, there are two completely different parts called "extractor" and "ejector", that people often confuse because of similar sounding names. So now, when you search for "AR extractor removal", the first hit on Google is about ejectors; and it specifically highlights the word "ejector" as bold, as if it came from the search query:

https://www.google.com/search?q=AR+extractor+removal