I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result.
I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of their search traffic at your blog that most people would go broke paying their web bill.
This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
I wonder if Google could build some custom variants of their search. That way they can use their underlying tech but reskin it to bias towards different things - eg favor local results, or scholarly, short form, or video/audio/text. Apply a lens or filter to results so we aren't all being served the same bland concoction of links.
Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared experiences so we might see some major labelled variants emerge that shape new communities.
Each could even have an internal product owner trying to beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which might drive some innovation from Google once again (assuming no real competition is breaking through that market domination anytime soon)
The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it. If they allowed several to exist, we could have several internets also existing without the need for a new walled garden.
As for your first question, they do that with local search.
But, also as an answer to your first question, no, there is no money in this that will show up on the next quarters income sheet.
As it is, the biggest way to deal with Google is regulations of breaking up search engines and ad networks. As long as Google controls the money making on the internet they'll be near unbeatable.
There are other problems as well. Popularity based rankings feed into themselves over time, creating the sort of extreme pareto distribution in popularity we see today where like a solid dozen of enormous websites get almost all of the traffic.
Yeah, this has been my thesis from the beginning, and the Marginalia search engine is basically constructed to verify this hypothesis. It's easy to dismiss such a notion when it's just words. It's much harder to brush off a more tangible demonstration.
Easy enough. Added a toggle for showing results that are <2 years old. May need to tune it a bit I guess (maybe 5 years).
Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of people are requesting these sorts of things...
Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Been trying Kagi for a few months now. Sadly, I don't notice much difference from Google.
For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
https://wilby.me/ does that. But back in the day all the "interesting, non-commercial websites" would be listed in a curated web directory arranged by subject, and we're still missing that. There is an emerging practice of niche subject-specific "awesome-lists" but these are no substitute.
Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are also the times in history we had really good aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
You're (maybe) inadvertently on to something there,
> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
1. (1) pastime, interest, pursuit -- (a diversion that occupies
one's time and thoughts (usually pleasantly);
I think what some of us are nostalgic for is when the "Web" was a way
to pass the time. For many it was a cultural curiosity first, then an
entertainment source. At some point it pivoted to being work. It
turned into filing taxes, shopping for insurance, and a place for
maintaining a "professional profile". From what I see of social media
a great many people make it into "work" of a kind. In this
metamorphosis we somehow made the silly web serious and the serious
web silly. Now nobody knows the difference and so the headspace of
"passtime" has itself sort of vanished.
That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it ;)
