https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
not really relatated at all to my search, but I'm very glad to find it. A beutiful looking site indeed. This is the kind of stuff I remember doing back in the 90s, you'd search for something then something more random would show up but often be interesting to check out.
"OK, you've created your web site, registered it, then found that there are 341 other web sites in your search engine category. How do you distinguish your web site from all of the rest? How do you encourage visitors to remember and revisit your web site? Add a games area!"
You find some really good in-depth content for niche areas on these sort of sites (personal HTML websites, neocities.org, etc.). But if you forget the URL, it's usually very hard to find them again on Google even with using specific keywords. Too much SEO spam clogging up the results. I suspect not having Google Analytics scripts on the pages may also contribute.
One that I can remember off the top of my head was a blog with a pink-ish background with content on making quills and ink from plants, among other stuff. One post specifically had an easy ink recipe that used walnuts iirc. Google will show you tons of big SEO'd Wordpress blogs with ads/affiliate links but not the old school genuine site.
Another one was the blog of a day trader (a real one, not a guy trying to sell day trading courses). Impossible to find. site:wordpress.com helps filter out some of the SEO spam but I think it must have been hosted on a custom domain. It definitely looked like a standard Wordpress website when I read it a long time ago.
Anecdotally, I clicked on the monkey.org link, poked around for thirty seconds, found
- an FAQ that didn't answer any questions I had
- a list of users (no particular reason to click on any, so I didn't)
- a list of domains (no particular reason to click on any, so I didn't)
... and no understanding of what "monkey.org" was or is. I've learned more reading the comments on this HN post than I did from the website.
This isn't to say monkey.org should change anything about what it's doing; it seems to be what it wants to be, and that's great. But a search engine isn't going to index that highly, because it generally answers nobody's questions about anything.
Compared to the tens of millions of competing -useful- sites, they are markedly less deserving of a spot. In fact, it would be unfair to award one to them purely because they are "independent".
A bookstores a bad analogy. Maybe a fashion store.
If you're a heavy consumer of the net you probably hit the edges of your algorithmic fish bowl pretty regularly. I know I do and it's work to get out.
Actually, I'd so much like to see different things more often I'd consider turning ads back on if the service could be provided.
On the Amazon-CEO news yesterday, someone posted an interview of JB from 1997 [0]. In the first 2-3 minutes he explained exactly that (but for books). There are X million titles on books, they keep a tiny fraction of that in stock for 'next day delivery'. Kinda what Google does (or many search engines). Usually you find the 'most popular' answers on the first page. But when I have a tech problem, I have usually tried the 'first 5 pages' of solutions before I even try to duck it (DDG) for a solution (dear wikihow, yes I did restart my PC!).
I assume HN has the type of readers that already KNOW the first 10 pages of solutions, and thus need that tiny level of detail that one gets after digging deep (stackexchange, forums, etc.)
Question if anyone who knows: does Google search engine give preference to websites that display Google ads, or it is agnostic? I assume Google's crawlers can 'read' if a website is using X, Y, or Z advertiser's ads. (I haven't used Google for many many years and I usually block any google search and ads related IPs and URLs)(and ads in general).
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM I suggest you spend the 5mins to watch this video. He made it sound so easy..
Officially, Google claims it does not [https://ads.google.com/home/resources/seo-vs-ppc].
The most accurate (sacrificing probability) answer is "Google's ranking algorithm is proprietary; nobody can independently verify whether they up-rank sites that display Google ads by looking at the source code." Attempts to figure that out from the outside via black-box testing are complicated by the simple ubiquity of Google ads; there's a lot of conflating signal that would have to be tuned out (even if one observes correlation between top search results and Google ads, one has to control for the probability that any random site has Google ads on it, or that ads pay for the SEO and information collection that tends to result in a site that ranks highly in Google results, or even the probability that a site without ads, having found itself high in the rankings because it's delivering data that Google concludes is valuable to users, wouldn't respond to that observation by putting Google ads on their site to capture money otherwise left on the table).
A randomizing carousel is a different tool, which Google is not. Nor, to my knowledge, is DDG or Bing... They show a different set of ten books, but the same optimizing goals apply for their use cases.
Is anyone doing something like a search engine that intentionally surfaces rarer data (i.e. makes the tradeoff intentionally of "less likely to satisfy your query, but seen by fewer people")? I'm not aware of one.
It's an unfortunate reflection of the "mainstream web" that I feel compelled to remark on the use of simple HTML and CSS, only marred by a single Google Analytics script. There's not a lot of content here, but there's also not a lot of bloat either.