zlacker

Many of the HN crowd remember when Google came into existence and how wonderful it was.

If it existed on the internet, Google would find it for you and it was usually the top resault. It was amazing.

Today, it's a shadow of its former self.

You regularly have to search, wade through the ads that are written like informative articles, adjust your query slightly and repeat the process. It's rubbish.

>>rantin+(OP)
What these people are remembering is when the web was small and dorks-only. Now it is huge and full of normies of all kinds, including every shade of commercialism and fraud.

>>rantin+(OP)
This, exactly. Google was a revelation, a clean page with the exact result you needed, at a time when many orgs were putting lots of high quality content online. The other search engines were busy portals and weren't indexing the new content.

>>jeffbe+32
Incorrect, the web was mainstream by 1996, two years before Google even launched.

>>pirate+x2
The number of internet users is currently 150x more than it was in 1996. I don't think you can make an argument that it was already mainstream in '96 with a few tens of millions of people on it.

The web was overwhelmingly informational up to an inflection point where it became overwhelmingly commercial. That's the thing people are upset about.

>>jeffbe+r3
This is absolutely right. The web died about then, really. What we have now is shameful and embarrassing, and society is poorer for it.

And it's not Google's fault.

But it also remains true that Google's search just doesn't work well for many people, and that some alternatives work better for them.

>>rantin+(OP)
I mean, Google still often gives me the result, but it’s such a chore now. And they can’t even seem to deal with what I consider extremely obvious blogspam.

Content that is just literally directly copied from other domains often.

>>pirate+x2
In 1996, did every traffic attorney publish a thought piece on why you should fight your summons in X county?

No, back then if you searched a topic you were MUCH more likely to find self hosted content from someone who nerded out on an issue and is sharing their insight, not publishing boilerplate because they feel they need to.

>>jeffbe+32
Yes, but other search engines existed before Google. They weren't very useful or pleasant to use.

Google solved a big problem and then went to sleep while counting their money. They even started to be evil.

Now the original problem has evolved but Google hasn't managed to keep up.