I think it'd be kind of neat in a backward way if we went back to the 'specialized encyclopedia' days of the 90s.
Web directories , 'Who's Who in Engineering' type lists, etc.
It's a step back from universal search engines being able to find stuff, but it's a step forward with regards to curation and quality of results; so i'm not sure if it's entirely a downgrade.
The early 90s 'website phonebook' type encyclopedias were interesting[0], but I always had to remind my mom "No, this isn't the entire internet, it's just a bunch of places that people like; the secret ones are 'unlisted'."
Note: I never say this is better than a search engine, it's just an interesting end-result after search engines got polluted and modified til the point of uselessness that we're at now with Google.
It's already kind of like that for me, in that almost all of my searches fall into these categories:
- Wikipedia
- Online documentation for whatever language/framework/tool I'm using
- Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange for most technical questions
- Reddit if SO/SE doesn't work, and for opinionated questions (e.g. r/BuyItForLife)
- Hacker news for software recommendations and technical opinionated questions
- Arxiv or the ACM library if it's a research paper (99% of the time, whenever I google something niche the only relevant results are papers)
- Other sites like caniuse.com, university sites for health and nutritional info, old-style forums for specific software
For these searches I'm just using Google to bring me to the specific site I want, because it's faster than using the site's own search functionality. Then there are the times I literally just type in the website instead of the URL bar (e.g. "instacart"), or when I use Google maps, images, or reviews.
I'm always wary when Google returns an unfamiliar site because I'm skeptical of the results. ~70% of the time it's some blogspam which is at best accurate but overly wordy, and at worst inaccurate; sometimes it's a blog from some random individual who for whatever reason went into a deep dive trying to understand what I'm searching for, that actually turns out to be useful; the rest, idk.
Web directories , 'Who's Who in Engineering' type lists, etc.
It's a step back from universal search engines being able to find stuff, but it's a step forward with regards to curation and quality of results; so i'm not sure if it's entirely a downgrade.
The early 90s 'website phonebook' type encyclopedias were interesting[0], but I always had to remind my mom "No, this isn't the entire internet, it's just a bunch of places that people like; the secret ones are 'unlisted'."
Note: I never say this is better than a search engine, it's just an interesting end-result after search engines got polluted and modified til the point of uselessness that we're at now with Google.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Directory-Guide-Usenet-Bitne...