I feel like this part has actually gotten worse in the last few years. No matter what I search for it's very rarely the thing I'm actually looking for, at least on google. Most of the time it's SEO'ed to hell in order to sell me stuff, and google will happily cut out half of my query just in order to show me promoted results. Like, when I search for "C# programming <name of class>" why is the <name of class> cut out and the entire first page of results is just paid programming courses???? That's a lot worse than it was just 5 years ago. We're going back on usability just to extract more money.
According to Google there are no bad products, but Amazon is predominantly filled with garbage. It’s pretty depressing.
Or try "Alice in Wonderland".
Search engines are too of the moment — maybe too corporate-bent? Or do we blame the users? Do most people want a bad film when they search rather than a literary classic?
In fact, all the points I mentioned are about the late 90s to early 2000s. A lot has changed during that period, and, I think, to something better overall. But it mostly stagnated or even regressed since ~2010, at least for the desktop web, it doesn't mean tech and the internet as a whole did.
"This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. ERROR_42 is an error that happens on ExampleSoft. In this blog, you will learn about ERROR_42 and how to fix it. First, let me say ERROR_42 ExampleSoft again. ERROR_42 is a very difficult error to fix in ExampleSoft. You first need to make sure you are getting ERROR_42 when running ExampleSoft. I know this because I am an expert in ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft."
...and on and on and on.
Yeah, on Google.
Other search engines will give you different results.
I loved the smaller web, where almost everything you saw was made directly by people who cared about the specific content they were sharing. Business websites were far more humble, and simpler. Web design was super creative and sometimes silly or fun. Further, I think search engines have degraded massively. We had a sweet spot around 2005-2015 maybe? But it's been downhill since. Google Search results are utterly terrible now, regressing back to ~year-2000 quality IMO.
Popups weren't much problem because most of the time I just disabled JS anyways (especially since it slowed sites down a lot), and only turned it on when a site I was trying to use wouldn't work at all. I didn't start leaving JS enabled until it started becoming a real limitation, and probably until the browsers started interpreting JS way faster.
I still think it's crazy how much commerce is transacted online. I understand, but it still blows my mind how everyone everywhere is using this shockingly unstable, insecure network to do... everything. The recent SolarWinds hack is another example how fundamental the problem of security is across all networked digital systems. Of course it's a lot better today than it was in the 90's, but that's just one of very few things that has genuinely improved, IMO.
- Slow (remember 56k modems)
- Expensive (remember when you had to pay by the minute)
- It was the early days of the browser war, which IE was winning. Remember the "best viewed" banners. It was one of the worst times for compatibility, you had plugins too: Java, Flash/Shockwave, ...
- Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for. We like to complain about the remaining 5%, but in the late 90s it was the norm.
- The web was simply smaller, there was less information. Wikipedia didn't exist for instance.
- Ads, terrible design and annoyances have always been a thing. The 90s had popups and blink, the 2000s had flash, and we now have JS.
- Tracking, privacy and security. The 90s web was insecure as hell. Remember there used to be a popup warning you that SSL was used, plain http was the norm. It was less of a concern simply because we used to do less on the web. It was a time when people were calling you crazy for buying something online.
So no, I don't miss it. It is a piece of history that would look nice in the digital equivalent of a museum, but for day to day use... no.