Search engines were pretty crappy when I first used the internet in the 90s. I’m not even sure that we had search engines, actually. Anyway, crappy search results were par for the course. The interesting content required some work to find. I think it’s still the same. There’s more content than ever, and a huge % is crap. Maybe that % is larger today then when we started, but there’s still a trove of good stuff out there. Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.

I’m thankful for the internet and the career it’s given me. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but all the same, it’s pretty great.

Signal-to-noise is a serious problem - hence Google's riches. BTW My reference era is post-search, pre-SEO.

> Way more, in absolute terms, than when I started.

Is it? How can you tell? I would expect there to be more... but also it's less encouraging to do all that work, and people not be able to find it...

People still make good websites. You just can't find them with Google (unless you're writing keywords to search for the exact site).

The landscape has changed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t high quality content available anymore. For example, a lot of content is on YouTube. That may or may not be someone’s preferred medium to consume, but there’s definitely good and niche content.

I think a lot of expert content is now mostly video content. A lot of the time I'm finding I'm just typing things into youtube rather than google if I'm after some kind of expertise.

The information tends to be of lower quality (despite the love). For example, I wanted to know why left and right bicycle pedals are threaded differently. Three youtubers gave reasons that I could tell didn't quite make sense. But Sheldon Brown's website explained it ("precession"). https://www.sheldonbrown.com/pedals.html

Looks like he added this detail later - it's easier to increase the quality of information like this with text, than with video.

Some people add VO later (jarring); Khan Academy re-does videos (breaking references between, confusingly). Most youtubers don't do either.

Videos often have paid product placement, unacknowledged. It's very effective promotion, because it feels grass-roots.

It’s weird that YouTube and Google is now synonymous with “the internet.”

I've seen this sentiment more and more over the last few years here (and on Reddit). Can you give an example of some high quality content that loses out to SEO clickbait at the moment? As far as I can see, a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask) will lead me to a well thought out response on Google 9/10 times, which is judtas often as it did 10 years ago.

I have some first-hand experience with this problem. I'll give a specific example:

In 2005 I published one of the Internet's earliest articles on the "Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon"[1], also known as Frequency Illusion. In the intervening 15 years, thousands of sites have linked to my article, so you would think it would rank really well.

Instead, my article is barely on the first page of Google's search results. Above mine are more recent copycat articles, few of them containing any meaningful details beyond what I included in mine. Some of them are so similar that they are clearly just lazy rewrites of my article (similar jokes, etc). They appear to be ranked higher than mine solely due to being more recent, and presumably some SEO shenanigans.

This is not the only example--far from it--but it's one of the clearest.

[1]: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...

Thanks for replying! There's clearly some "google-washing" going on here, as searching for "baader meinhof phenomenon" on google places the Damn interesting article 5th in my search results. The other results above that may not have huge differences, but they do offer at least the same information on "more reputable" (read: names that I recognize in 2021) websites which would likely Garner a click from Mr..

OP here, a recent one I was thinking of (I don't recall the exact search I used) "bicycle pedals threading" https://www.google.com/search?q=bicycle+pedals+threading

The top results (including youtubers) gave the right answer, but the wrong reasons. You have to get down to the 5th (Sheldon Brown's) for expertise (it's "precession"). Sheldon passed away a few years ago, and now his site has ads - a limitation of personal websites.

> a "correctly" crafted query (read: the querymy parents would ask, not the query I would ask)

Can you elaborate please; an example?

Maybe you mean a grammatically correct sentence, which good for finding answers on forums, but I'm more interested in an expert's whole site.

Note that correct terminology is half the battle for searching, perhaps much more!

Wikipedia probably covers a lot of this ground now, though it's a reference and of varying quality and approach.