This is exactly why people started appending "site:www.reddit.com" to their searches. It was much easier (but not guaranteed) to find organic discussion and reviews of products.

Of course, nothing gold can stay, and this tarnish appeared by way of pigfucker Spez making Reddit worse by allowing corporations to flood the site with bots in the name of boosting MAUs for the IPO. That said, I can appreciate the position Google is in- how do you get to be a search engine of such size that your users can trust your results you deliver to them, filter out SEO spam, and have the whole system automated due to costs?

Or rather, I would appreciate that position, if Google were more interested in quality search results than in spam advertising.

Kagi is a paid search engine. It allows you to uprank or downrank specific webpages. In that sense it's very powerful.

Have a look at marginalia.nu - it's like a return to the old days

im not aware of what you want, but ceo bullshit is usually made to trick google search. any other engine will be better, even bing is unironically superior to google rn.

Looks like you can do it manually. Build your own Google flavor https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/134847/how-to-filter-out-a-long-list-of-sites-from-google-search

So you want Kagi

Even "honest reviews" aren't all that honest. My mother is an Amazon Vine affiliate, which is a program where they send you stuff for free and you write a review and get to keep it. They aren't overt about it, but they make it fairly obvious that you're supposed to write reviews that are positive overall.

Operation Mindcrime is a gem!

Probably the best thing about Verge covering this is simply signal boost, getting the story out to a wider audience.

It sucked back then, but it sucked happily. Now it's just sad.

Back then it was messy, you couldn't find anything, but at least everything worked as intended. Hell you could do a whois on something and actually get data back. You could email the netadmin of whatever place you had trouble with. Now it's just a wasteland of content free corpo sites.

There was a pre-Google search that was really bad. Then Google raised the standard by optimising for good results. The trick was to stay one move ahead of SEO devs. First people spammed keywords, then people spammed backlinks, etc.

The issue is now that it's very outdated and the best thing for websites to do is go spam AI articles about everything. The obvious move would be to move websites with higher specificity to the search query up.

The problem is that Google can do that and optimise for fewest actual clicks on links instead of needing to click 3 to get a result. Instead it's better to click 3 pages with 3 sets of ads then hopefully the "I got what I came for" feeling is in the goldilocks "enough to be interested but not to stop". This means more screentime, which is more ads that mean more money.

This is peak capitalism guuuys

I dunno, I had this conversation in another thread recently. I was 13 in 2000. The web was a disaster then. Sure, there were good parts, but every website was an outright attack on your computer. Java and Flash were everywhere and they were so easily exploited. I'd go to websites and they'd pop up 100 different windows of hardcore porn, audio on, the whole nine.

But yeah, it's just a different suck now.

Like you, I was using the internet before the web. The time before monetization. IRC. USENET. GOPHER. IRC replaced my interest in ham radio - I figured: "what's the point? With a modem, I can talk around the world and don't need thousands of dollars and a tower in my back yard!" packet radio, which I used to send and receive messages to my parents, evaporated.

Even when the web first came to being, it was special. HoTMaiL, the free html mail client, took off like wildfire. There weren't even ads, because the ad industry didn't know what to do with this new medium. Search found relevant interests, people were expressing themselves on ISP-hosted websites, and angelfire and geocities gave a more feature-rich experience.

The initial banner ads were easy enough to ignore. The pop-ups, scareware, and security hell hole that was the early/mid-2000's was the precipice that the web stepped off and here we are.

1995-2010 were the halcyon days. I miss the shit out of the web back then. And I've been around long enough that I set up some of the first mail relays and usenet mirrors when I was a teen, besides having one of the largest BBSs in Canada.

Just listened to it again. Highly recommend. The short of it is more searches == more ads == more $. There’s a conflict between a great search experience (landing not on google) versus the time you spend ON Google.

Great story and just terrible outcome.

Yeah I have been using DuckDuckGo for about a decade. I noticed a drop in quality as soon as the Microsoft Bing partnership. Now it is mostly just a Bing clone. Which is really sad. They were really good and really cared about consumers privacy. I have been moving over to Startpage but have yet to do a full read up on its policies and do a full test of the quality of the search results. Though so far I am quietly optimistic.

Might try this

https://millionshort.com/

Just gave it a quick test drive it and it's pretty promising, thanks for the tip.

Merci, je vais l'essayer

Duck Duck Go is also complete trash these days, just in different ways.

Make a search on Bing, then make a search on DuckDcukGo. Compare the results. You'll find out that DuckDcukGo is just a front end for another site that provides links to business affiliates.

Isn't the head of Google search, Yahoo's former head of search?

The Internet is so big nowadays that you pretty much need to have some kind of algorithm. A list of all websites in "the right category" would have way too many items in it most of which would be useless. We live in an attention economy: lots of people want as many people as possible to pay attention to them, but everyone's attention is obviously limited.

No I don't know how to fix this.