That was what the early internet was like (I was there). People built indexes by hand, lists of pages on certain topics. There was the Gopher protocol that was supposed to help with finding things. But this was all top-down stuff, the first indexing/crawling search engines were bottom-up and it worked so much better. And for a while we had an ecosystem of different search engines until Google came along, was genuinely miles better than everything else, and wiped everything else out. Really, search isn't the problem, its the way that search has become tied to advertising and tracking thats the problem. But then DuckDuckGo is there if you want to avoid all that.
In the very early days, you didn't need a search engine because there weren't that many web sites and you knew most of the main ones anyway (or later on had them in your own hotlists in Mosaic). Nowadays you need a search because there is so much content.
The problem is that the amount of content and the size of the potential user base are so large that is is impossible to offer search as a free service, i.e. it has to be funded in some way. Perhaps instead of having a free advertising-driven search, there would be space for a subscription-based model? Subscription based (and advert free) models seem to be working in other areas, e.g. TV/films and music.
Another problem though is that more and more content seems to be becoming unsearchable, e.g. behind walled gardens or inside apps.
Exactly my thought. But it definitely wouldn't get mass adoption which is good because mass-market content websites are questionable in terms of user experience (they also need to cover content creating costs by popups/ads/pushes). One thing, though, ad based search engines lift ad based websites because they can sell ad on a second end.
Maybe we'll see advent of specialised paid search engines SaaSs with authentic and independent content authors like professional blogs.
Search is the problem. If you don’t rank in google you don’t exist on the internet. There is an entire economy built on manipulating search that is pay to play in addition to google continually focusing on paid search of natural SERPs. Controlling search right now is controlling the internet.
true, but when it was lycos, hotbot, altavista, google, webcrawler, aol, gopher, archy, usenet and so many other sources it was much easier to exist in many ways (harder to dominate) - people used to ‘surf the web’, join “webrings” and share stuff.. now they consume and post memes. so i blame behavior as much as monopoly
A lot of other things have changed since then, so the difference in tone you are noticing might not have much to do with search engines. In 1996 there were only about 16 million people on the internet, and usage obviously skewed towards the more technical nerdy crowd. Now there are 4,383 million people on the internet. Which is about 57% of everyone.
I see this a lot on HN. People forget that a lot of things in the early days of the Internet only worked because there were so few people on the Internet.
If you were rich and had a T1 in your home in the days everyone was on dialup, sure you could host a website yourself. But these days, even if you're one of the lucky residents on a gigabit symmetrical connection, there's a limit to how much you can serve. Self-hosting isn't an option unless your website is a niche.
