The Brain Dump

8-11-24

Search Engines

Today is Sunday, so I wanted to complain briefly so I can prepare to go back to the drone factory in the morning. Today I want to shake my fist impotently at the modern search engine. What's so bad about it? Advertising and SEO has it all kinds of fucked up to the point that regular people can't get noticed on the internet anymore. The top 10+ pages are all kinds of advertised bullshit instead of results that may actually be relevant to your search. And now, we jump into the time machine.

It was a warm Summer evening when I first found askjeeves.com... But seriously, search engines were actually better in my opinion. Instead of SEO stuff trying to dictate to you the most "relevant" search results were, you'd get the links that had the most interaction with particular key words. It was the wild West where popularity overruled advertising. I'll admit it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows for a small segment of the population.

WTF am I talking about? I don't know. What I do know is a lot of those personal websites were way too obscure to get high rankings on search engines. Keep in mind I'm talking about all those Geocities, Angelfire, Earthlink, etc. sites. What did we do in order to rectify this problem with our searchability? We came up with the concept of webrings. For the uninitiated, a webring was basically a rudimentary search engine. You'd find a webring and apply to have your site entered into it. If you did, you'd get your website added to the list of sites in the webring's index and you'd get your own little links to put your site into the webring.

B-b-b-but what about muh engagement? Well, webrings (at least that I recall) weren't ranking sites based on hits. It was just a way for people with sites that have similar content or interests to group themselves together. It sounds kind of goofy, but when you just needed that GIF of Doomguy dying ASAP, you knew you could jump into a webring with that kind of content and find what you were looking for with a little effort.

That's all for now. As they say, I'm going to make like a wombat and GTFO out here.