You mean a world where people still knew how to use a library catalog, still relied on more than one source of information and curious crazy tid bits are still out there?

The internet is boring. And the trash is still there. Its just become reputable instead.

There's a lot to unpack here...

Can you expand on how a card catalog improved the world? As a kid I used the card catalog a lot, both the physical version and the later electronic versions. Full text search definitely leads to pulling in information from a wider selection of sources.

I remember a lot of stratification of news sources pre-Google (which news channel you watched, which papers/magazines you read). Did Google cause reliance on one source of information, or does Google simply exist in a world where people tend towards echo chambers? How would Alta Vista have improved that?

> how a card catalog improved the world

i was lamenting the library recently and remembered how books were organized on shelves using the dewey decimal system

this meant that if you knew of one book that has something you're looking for, you can find all the _other_ books about the same topic right next to the first book, even if you knew nothing about the contents of the related books

Libraries still exist and sort books like that, don't they?

I believe the point is that the commenter wishes more things operated like that, where adjacent items were related and likely of similar quality, not just boosted with money and SEO trickery.

They're being ripped down and replaced by coffee shops with plugs and wifi

> still relied on more than one source of information and curious crazy tid bits are still out there?

I think the curious crazy tid bits are still there.

I'd be okay with a world in which everyone else in search didn't lose, too.

Yes, I did! I used to use Yahoo search where the results were more hand-curated and people did not create websties for intensive commercial purposes with useless SEO fluff like it is today.

I have been thinking a lot about Yahoo (pre yahoo-search, largely) lately. I don't fully understand how we lost the curated catalog, especially considering the success of Wikipedia. The latter demonstrates users willingness to curate knowledge bases... We have "awesome" lists, but I rarely seem to use them.

Yahoo directory was largely pay-to-play and very affected by proto-SEOs trying to game the system for direct traffic or PageRank value. Collaborative directories like dmoz.org suffered the same fate before shutting down.

Pay-to-play is actually a very decent business model for a directory, though. Pay a one-time fee, establish that you're a legitimate business or website, undergo a quality assessment, and you're in. There's no paying for extra promotion, e.g. with ads, and website owners don't need to warp their sites in anticipation of what they think the search engine wants. (Which often results in a decrease in usability, e.g. all of those recipe sites with low-quality 2000-word essays before they get to the actual recipe.)

It's a more level playing field, and it's intrinsically more human-friendly.

In some way, didn't Google become Alta Vista?

How so? My memory of Alta Vista was so-so search results with a top page littered with garbage.

Exactly like Google since 2011 +/- 2 years (the so-so search results part) and Google the last few years (the littered with garbage part)?

I have used Google since probably 2001-2002 sometime and a number of other search engines before. It is rather obvious to me and I have writing and screenshots from around the time quality took a dive that supports it.

I think over time the story has become that AV and Yahoo were overtaken by Google because the latter had a cleaner design, which if you think about it for more than a moment doesn't really constitute much of a moat.

Google was also technically better when it released and importantly there was no way to buy ones way to the top.

Back then I think people mostly agreed that the results that ranked on top in Google generally were there because of criteria that benefited the end user.

I mean, even as crazy as Google results has been the last few years they have still managed to be better than Bing and DDG who both manages to have worse ranking and also like Google completely ignore my doublequotes.

Reminder: Alta Vista looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#/media/File:Altavist...

Exactly

Google