Bah. The best search results were clearly more than a decade ago. Even a decade ago too much SEO manipulation (and search engine collusion) was showing up in the search results we saw.
I don’t agree that the best search was regular expressions and Boolean combinators ala AltaVista. Early Google was quite the improvement (and still had some advanced operators), and even the first release of Bing was almost as good. Anyone remember the Bing v. Google challenge MS encouraged people to do? I picked my own niche interests and while Google won, Bing put points on the board.
I think it was sometime after AdWords and DoubleClick merged when things went downhill. I don’t remember the exact timeframe, but eventually the advertisers and SEO parts started directing search from the inside, things steadily decreased in quality. Adding “reddit” to the end of a search was a entry-level way to fight against that, not a return to old or new peak search quality.
The problem back then is there was not a lot of content. It was just a sheer lack of credible sources for common topics. Reddit and Wikipedia bridged the gap but of course they want to rape Wikipedia and have already dismantled reddit.
Bah. The best search results were clearly more than a decade ago. Even a decade ago too much SEO manipulation (and search engine collusion) was showing up in the search results we saw.
I don’t agree that the best search was regular expressions and Boolean combinators ala AltaVista. Early Google was quite the improvement (and still had some advanced operators), and even the first release of Bing was almost as good. Anyone remember the Bing v. Google challenge MS encouraged people to do? I picked my own niche interests and while Google won, Bing put points on the board.
I think it was sometime after AdWords and DoubleClick merged when things went downhill. I don’t remember the exact timeframe, but eventually the advertisers and SEO parts started directing search from the inside, things steadily decreased in quality. Adding “reddit” to the end of a search was a entry-level way to fight against that, not a return to old or new peak search quality.
The problem back then is there was not a lot of content. It was just a sheer lack of credible sources for common topics. Reddit and Wikipedia bridged the gap but of course they want to rape Wikipedia and have already dismantled reddit.
I agree Wikipedia was a pretty poor hit in '98, but by '06 it was pretty decent.
The one thing I will admit is, game guides migrating to YouTube and not just some text file I search through has ruined the format irreparably.
I guess wikis help but they are often to much of a project then just writing it out so they go undeveloped.