• TrumpetX@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        Pay to play was the problem there. I had the highest ranking joke page on webcrawler for a stint, but Yahoo wanted $500 to put me on top. My 15 year old self was not interested.

      • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Or AI to rank and filter out the things you need based on public indexing. Preferably there’d be several AI assistants to choose from. Things seem to be moving in that direction anyway.

      • Sem@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        The problem is that personalization of search results tends to information bubbles. That is the reason why I prefer DDG over Google.

      • _sideffect@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Ai won’t help since it’ll be programmed to show only what it’s owners want us to see

        • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
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          6 months ago

          Given that the indices are not available locally, it’d be difficult for your own algorithm of any sort, AI or otherwise, to rank items higher/lower than others.