Drew has a longstanding history of ill-informed rants ([1] [2]) about technology. He's also quite willing to lie about the facts[3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121609
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121609
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Digging up past internet history as ammunition in an argument isn't cool in general. It's not that such details are necessarily wrong or irrelevant, but doing this has a systemically degrading effect and we don't want to be that sort of community.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That being said, I do see a valid reason for bringing up his history of bad takes. I use to respect Devault. He banned me on the Fediverse because he disagreed with me being against defunding the police and against critical race theory.
I find some of stuff interesting, and I agree with more AGPL and more real open source development. I'd even say I'm jealous that he can actually fund himself off of his FOSS projects and do what he loves.
But I do agree, he does have a lot of questionable takes. He seems to love Go and hate Rust, hate threads for some reason, and has a lot of RMS style takes. Not all of them are bad, and hardcore people can help you think.
As far as this post goes, I do think search is pretty broken. I think a better solution is more specialized search. Have a web tool just for tech searching that does StackExchange sites, github, blogs, forums, bug trackers and other things specialized to development.
Another idea would be an index that just did blogs, do you can look up any topic and see what people are writing about long form for the current month. Add features to easily see what people were saying 5 or 10 years ago too. There is a ton of specialized work there, in filtering blog spam, making sure you get topics from all sides (including "banned" blogs), etc.
You use to have to go to Lycos, Yahoo, Hotbot, Excite and you'd get different results and find lots of different helpful things. We need that back. It will take some good, specialized tools, to break people from Google search.