
Fravia's web-searching lore (2009) - userbinator
http://search.lores.eu/indexo.htm
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petra
With all the changes in search engines(only Google and bing left,
personalization, Google disregarding a lot of your search operators and
intent) - do you still find the lore usefull ?

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userbinator
I think it's rather sad what Google has become; in an attempt to make search
"more human", they have also quite successfully replicated all the
_disadvantages_ of asking a not-so-intelligent human to find what you're
looking for, complete with second-guessing and subtly modifying your queries
as well as not showing everything that does match. I am not completely
convinced there is an ulterior motive behind it, but it could certainly be one
way of controlling what the population thinks or even the language: if all
searches for foo are silently redirected to fob or a similar but actually
different thing, then it reduces the ability to discover --- and subsequently
propagate --- information about foo.

Near the turn of the century(!), I remember hearing that the Internet was one
of the places you could find information on very obscure/fringe subjects, and
for a while that was actually true; but now it seems that search engines are
gradually cutting off that fringe in optimising for the popular and
mainstream.

I also noticed Google's search results took a nosedive in quality (~2010) not
long after Fravia passed away --- I doubt there's any correlation there, but
that felt a little surprising to me.

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koja86
Sad I know.

Selling advertisement (tied to a "free" service) is mass market. My guess is
power users are a) harder to capitalize on b) more demanding. There's plenty
of low hanging fruit in general public so why bother?

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pm3003
One of my all time favourite websites.

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kim0
Oh the memories!

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pfarnsworth
Indeed, I was going to say the same thing. Fravia+ was where I had read about
Orc+ if I remember the name correctly, who had a series of tutorials on how to
crack games. I think I downloaded his entire site back in the day, I wonder
where in my terabytes of junk data I have it.

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lottin
How To Crack - a tutorial by the Old Red Cracker.

One of my favourite quotes: a red flower in our mouth, a cold determination in
our fingers, a computer not far away... death to Gates!

At the time I took ORC very seriously and to this day I still have the same
contempt for MicroSoft as back then, even though nowadays MS has become mostly
a bad joke, a pathetic shadow of its former self.

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john_other_john
why is Microsoft so lame?

I think much of the industry a joke, and Microsoft a exception.

I have lived through a 30 year saga of battles for really basic baselines to
be established, insofar as the wars over office software databases and
operating systems are concerned. Yes, I am impressed by what I see now, so
much has evolved fantastically, but mostly users perform the same tasks and
there is no recorded gain in productivity I am aware of. Gates wanted ubiquity
of computers. His actions probably did more to enable that than any other
individual. Without Microsoft the sometimes seemingly embittered motivation
for Linux would not have been anything like it was. I think Gates always
wanted to move on to more interesting goals in computing, and am inclined to
think the company open source decisions do more for enabling advancement than
anything else, because they make a ubiquitous platform more consistent to
write for, the perennial monopoly complaint of a aggressive Microsoft. The
cash cow applications are bundled now with facility permitted only by
integration at prices only low as they are enabled by dominance, and I see
nothing not dominant or lame, about that. I only recently benefitted from VS
Community, and am still really happy at that, and I bet BillG would dearly
love to give SQLServer away if only he could earn from it like a operating
system (it is enough one already) and it's a peculiar delight to think Larry E
may actually lay awake at night, one day, fearful that possibility is real. I
think the reason has more to do with necessity to pay big sales commission to
maintain the ecosystem around Microsoft database business, which provides for
the channel welfare in turn supporting the rest. Meanwhile there is no Linux
competitor because the GPL is anti competition. Except and unless, like all
the big convert lovers of open source, someone uses the ability of cloud VDI
to never have to release their code. Then we'll have incentive to make a Linux
ecosystem selling desktop seats. I'm sure that's why Microsoft is porting so
much, even experimentally.

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yasp
I notice that certain sections of the site are "closed" and designed for
clever searchers. Unfortunately the site's integrity is somewhat poor since 2
of the 3 mirrors are down, and the site's internal search function is broken.
Sad. Is there zipped archive of the site anywhere?

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pvitz
[http://mirror.search.lores.eu/](http://mirror.search.lores.eu/)

