They’ve become the ultimate rent seeker, which wants me to believe it is signaling their demise in the near-term, but it probably means the opposite, they have the ability to leverage their monopoly.

Your comment really nails the issue. There's a vicious feedback loop in place.

it really is kind of startling -- to quote old Hamlet - "oh, what a falling-off was there!"

90s web : content good, looks rubbish

2019 web : content rubbish, looks good

trying to help my kid with research reports &etc is a nasty chore these days -- for the amount of effort it takes to find a decent informative non-wikipedia page these days, may as well go to the physical library

One thing I've noticed myself doing is that when I (increasingly rarely) stumble across a good, high-useful-information density website on anything I have even a passing interest in (typically either some sort of obscure fora, or a personal blog/website), I carefully bookmark and tag it on the spot, because I'll never be able to find it again otherwise.

It’s funny I remember reading an article maybe 15 years ago saying bookmarking was dead because search had gotten so good.

It was kind of believable at the time.

:)

I'll add some other factor: emitional.

Old web was a mess of people making things as expression, excitment. I think it matters to feel being 'connected' to someone rather than parsing a rendered data structure.

I felt the same reading old encyclopedias, you can feel the author way of thinking a bit. It feels a bit more enjoyable.

>2019 web : content rubbish, looks good

Or at least it would have looked good, if it wasn't covered in "SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER" and "ACCEPT OUR COOKIES" light boxes.

Which is only slightly less rubbish than having it covered in the semi-pornographic pop-over ads of yore.

An "accept our cookies" window blocker would be so incredible. I mean how are they even getting informed consent when I can't tell what's going to happen when I deny the request? I want to read an article, not judge whether you're trying to invade my privacy.

Firefox, please treat "can set cookies" as a permission and allow me to set it to "ask" by default, and allow it to be toggled by clicking on the site permissions lock box. The existing user interface does not give me any control.

I guess I'm getting old but I really miss the 90's web. Also, libraries are just rooms with computers these days, at least in my town. I miss 90's libraries more than I miss the 90's internet.

Bingo. There are still some websites which have a tenacious grip on the 90's style and are chock full of information. However, you aren't going to find them with G and the like.

I've been meaning to set up YaCy for a while and see if the P-t-P search structure works better for finding non-scroller web pages. I fear that I'll find those results also tainted by shills.

[edit: Forgot to mention Gigablast, which works fairly well. Definitely not for the faint of heart]