Search used to rely on formalized 'ad-hoc' curation in the form of DMOZ and other web directories. Without it, SEO has become the main influence on results and search-engines are now heavily focusing on novelty and recency in the hope of turning up something that the user was actually looking for. Of course 'novelty' is the polar opposite of something like textfiles, or of many well-established online resources.
Re:textfiles.com
by londons_explore on Monday April 27, 2020 @11:44AM
(#22996924)
While links have in the past been used to rank webpages, it isn't strictly necessary. You could have billions of documents and still figure out which one answers a question simply with a good ML model looking at the text of the documents alone.
Re:textfiles.com
by annihilatormod on Monday April 27, 2020 @01:59PM
(#22998226)
I really enjoy sites that have extremely long linkrolls on them, but they tend to always be static linkrolls of the homepages of sites or blogs rather than pointing at specific high quality posts or areas of those sites. Sites that have a 'cool links I was looking at last month'-esque Link section are very interesting though. Alexey Guzey's site[0] is a good example of this kind of thing.
It feels like a bait and switch to me because search used to yield more interesting results, and social networks did relatively little to get you to buy something, but as their precision in achieving their commercial goals have increased that is no longer true.