this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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internet funeral
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If you say you'd pay for a search engine. Oof. Guys we used to just link useful things at the end of our blog posts and on our myspace pages. Then search engines came in and we didn't have to. Then they killed the SEO placement of blogs. Now you can't find anything useful unless you try their AI. The whole business model is convincing us we need them while they make the internet less efficient to scroll through.
... do you think MySpace came before search engines?
Replace Myspace with Geocities and it's broadly correct of my experience in 90s internet.
There were a ton of search engines in the 90s around the same time Geocities was released. AskJeeves was probably the most popular, but there was Altavista, Lycos, Dogpile, Yahoo... Shit, Google came out in 97, which was only a few years after Geocities.
When I had my Geocities website, I used Webcrawler as my preferred search engine. Cute spider and spiderweb iso/logo. Then came Altavista (altavista.digital.com, it was at first) and I switched. It brought more and better results. Somehow I never liked Lycos. And Yahoo, the first years, was a categorised catalogue/guide, kinda curated, and you had to submit a site to be considered to be added. You had to choose under which category (and subcategory, quite often) it should be listed. Also, at first, it wasn't Yahoo.com, it was buried in some .edu (or .ac, I don't quite recall) URL.
Webrings ftw
Yahoo Directory is the OG
Was altavista really a search engine?
Lycos
AskJeeves
Dogpile. Webcrawler. Gopher.
I was always partial to hotbot
Technically yes, but there were also a ton more, including Google.
I understand why you would pay and can respect it. But access to an organized and searchable internet is something closer to a right than a privilege, in my mind.
Care to explain? Or you're only capable of talking shit?
It sounds like what the picture is making fun of, already materialized in this kagi search engine. Paying for a search just is a about face from what the Internet was designed to be. You could argue everything is this way, but I'd then argue consumers are bigger pushovers now.
Everyone pays for search. You do it through attention/data traded to advertisers or currency.
If Kagi is functionally better than Google and respects my privacy, I would not mind paying for it.
No, actually.
SearX/SearXNG is a free and open source, highly customizable, and self-hostable meta search engine. SearX instances act as a middle man, they query other search engines for you, stripping all their spyware ad crap and never having your connection touch their servers. Of course you have to trust the SearX instance host with your query information, but again if you are that paranoid just self host.
I personally also trust some foss loving sysadmin that host social services for free out of alturism, who also accepts hosting donations, with my info over Google/Alphabet any day.
Heres a list of all public searx instances, I personally prefer to use paulgo.io All SearX instances are configured different to index different engines. If one doesn't seem to give good results try a few others.
Did I mention it has bangs like duckduckgo? If you really need google like for maps and buisness info just use !!g in the query
search.marginalia.nu is a completely novel search engine written and hosted by one dude that aims to prioritize indexing lighter websites little to no javascript as these tend to be personal websites and homepages that have poor SEO and the big search engines won't index well. If you remember the internet of the early 2000s and want a nostalgia trip this ones for you
Finally, YaCy is another completely novel search engine that uses p2p technology to power a big webcrawler which prioritizes indexes based off user queries and feedback. Everyone can download yacy and devote a bit of their computing power to help out a collective search engine. Companies can also download yacy and use it to index their private intranets. They have a public instance available through a web portal. Its not a great search engine for what most people want, which is quick and relevant information within the first few clicks. But it is an interesting use of technology and what a true honest-to-god community-operated search engine would look like untainted by SEO scores.
I hope this has been informative to those who believe theres only a few options to pick from, I hate to be the 'bhut achthually' guy but know these options are so unknown to most people.
The problem with all those search providers is: Someone still has to pay for infrastructure. You can either donate/pay for the service or accept ads and tracking.
(I know that YaCy works a bit differently, but honestly even though I really like the idea of the system: This "novel" search engine is almost 20 years old now and never really worked very good.)
Very true, there always being a cost somewhere is a general rule for all services in general. Its the reality of computer infrastructure that theres gotta be a computer/server somewhere eating bandwidth and energy, and someone with enough time + technical knowledge to maintain them. Those cost need to be offset either through donation or profit, or the service provider just has to eat the expenses and pay out of pocket. 'no cost actually' is in reference to the end users directly paying for something with direct money or collected private info sold to ad companies. In many public hosting instances for open source services most active users don't pay or donate at all and get to use the service without their info being sold. In these cases the expense is split between a few donations from better off charitable users and the rest is out of pocket from the sysadmin who most likely has a real job that pays well enough they can eat the hosting fees and not worry about it.
You're welcome 😎
Your purchase is monumentally stupid and he's laughing at that
Yet it would be interesting to hear, why this shocks you so much. :)
Is it because you don't think search engines are a service worth paying for or because Google, Bing, DDG … are free?
I'm not sure if this is really feasible (even though I'd be happy to see a working libre search engine). The problem I see is that a search engine is incredibly expensive to run, which makes it hard to maintain servers on a donation model.
You just dated the hell out of yourself, but also showed how young you are at the same time.
Haha, I'm too young to really have lived it, I'm only 26 so... I did experience the start of Facebook and Twitter. I'm very glad people who did live through it are expanding on it.
Yeah it sounds like you got online right when Web 2.0 was starting to really kick off. Back before then we did have search functions, though they were pretty primitive compared to what they've become now (and also before they went to shit with excessive SEO and advertising). Web 2.0 really marked the emphasis towards UX design and social network functionality within web sites/design, though people had links on their personal pages well before all that.