posted in Technology
Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment: “Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was.”
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/remembering-the-pre-google-web-when-search-was-an-experiment/
Ars TechnicaRemembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experimentMost people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was."
Replying to @sanitation@lemmy.today
I remember Google coming out and changing everything.
It had billions of pages instead of millions.
It returned results in seconds, and by seconds I mean 2-3, not 60.
Everything else became irrelevant overnight.
Now Google search is shit.
it’s not just google
for the past year or so I’ve been telling people that DDG is so much better as it actually returns the results you’re looking for, which Google stopped doing. except in the past few months, the same thing is happening there now too.
I don’t know if it’s fuckery with the search engines, people gaming SEO, ads, or if it’s just the sheer quantity of shit that’s on the internet now, but it’s at least half of the time now that I go to search something and it’s not in the top half dozen results. and sometimes I can’t even find it at all, despite knowing that it definitely exists out there.
It’s the web in general. Pages that have been meticulously altered to score high on the latest search engines so they get the most visibility. I remember several times where the top results were obviously LLM generated text scraped from multiple other pages. Tons and tons of text with absolutely zero substance on the topic I was trying to learn about.
I switched to using Startpage as my search engine now. It works great. It feels like being transported back in time. It gets the results I want. Less websites full of AI generated fluff articles.