this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
601 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
58061 readers
31 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Before we had Google, we had Altavista and before that we had indexes like Yahoo. Maybe we should consider going back. With the help of AI (I know...) it seems feasible to keep up with the ever growing content.
You can't really go back. Those old engines worked on more naive algorithms against a significantly smaller pool of websites.
The more modern iteration of Altavista/AOL/Yahoo has been the aggregation sites like Reddit, where people still post and interact with the site to establish relevancy. Even that's been enshittified, but its a far better source than some basic web crawler that just scans website text and metadata for the word "Horse" and returns a big listical of results based on a hash weighted by number of link-backs.
That system was gamed decades ago and is almost trivial to undermine in the modern moment. Nevermind how hard you'd need to work to recreate the original baseline hash tables that these old engines built up over their own decades of operation.