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.
Amen. GameFAQs >>> Wikis > YouTube. Video is just a bad medium for reference material; to make it even passable you have to pair it with a TOC with timestamps.
One of the first things I ever got off the Internet was a detailed GameFAQ-style document with all the secrets to the arcade version of Killer Instinct, not understanding how much they changed for the N64 version. We didn’t even have Internet at home, I printed it out from … either summer math camp or the computer lab at the local community college. I referred to the GameFAQ for R-Type Final to 100% the game (again) on the lead up the to R-Type Final 2 release, so they were still high-quality fairly recently. (Had to dust off the PS2 and lucky the CD drive still worked 9/10 times.)
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 too much of a project then just writing it out so they go undeveloped.
Amen. GameFAQs >>> Wikis > YouTube. Video is just a bad medium for reference material; to make it even passable you have to pair it with a TOC with timestamps.
One of the first things I ever got off the Internet was a detailed GameFAQ-style document with all the secrets to the arcade version of Killer Instinct, not understanding how much they changed for the N64 version. We didn’t even have Internet at home, I printed it out from … either summer math camp or the computer lab at the local community college. I referred to the GameFAQ for R-Type Final to 100% the game (again) on the lead up the to R-Type Final 2 release, so they were still high-quality fairly recently. (Had to dust off the PS2 and lucky the CD drive still worked 9/10 times.)