Fare is unrelated to fair:
> From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel!, equivalent to fare (“to fare, travel, journey”) + well.*
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farewell#Etymology
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fare
So to say "farewell" to someones is "have a good journey (in life?)".
I can only assume, but considering the Dutch "vaarwel" is so close to English, I'm going to guess it means "Go well" - or more poetically when speaking of one's path in life: may fate treat you well.
True, but ‘fair well’ was likely just a misspelling.
> So to say “farewell” to someones is “have a good journey (in life?)”
On the wiki page for ‘fare’, you have to scroll a little to see the most relevant usage - see Etymology 2 definitions 2, 4, and 5. To get along, to pass through an experience, to happen, to progress.
As a verb, farewell is roughly synonymous with ‘be well’. (This agrees with have a good journey in life, but it doesn’t need to be thought of as travel or an analogy to travel, the meaning and common usage of farewell is already abstract and more general than travel, e.g., “how has your business fared?”)
As a noun, farewell has come to mean a valediction (the opposite of a greeting): wishing someone well when parting. Funny enough, valediction in multiple dictionaries I just checked is defined as a farewell or as the act of bidding farewell.
Adiós - A diós - go to god. [1]
[0] https://www.thetabernaclechoir.org/articles/goodbye-is-short...
[1] https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/145252/origins-of-adis
Today - well, two possible things have happened. Either scamming search engines have become too effective for even a company with the resources of Alphabet to mitigate. Or, Google optimised for revenue rather than knowledge indexing. Which one seems more likely?
Google is still better at it than their competition, but Google’s model is now being pressured by big money. Local businesses in Europe are simply losing any sort of search auction to the Chinese sites as an example.
Anyway, you can always pay for Kagi if you want a better experience on the internet.
Adwords - clearly marked as ads. Or are you suggesting the results themselves could be bought and sold? This was definitely not the case.
> Do you think that selling result placement for keywords and search terms to the highest bidder had a higher resilience to search engine optimisation than other search engines?
Again, manipulating the actual results via financial inducement to google was not a thing. Quite the reverse.
> A lot of their early competition around the world didn’t really do “search” as much as they did a combination of web content in a “portal” sort of presentation.
I’m not sure why you have this impression. There were many competitors for search prior and concurrent with google that operated in the same fashion. As I said earlier, they were simply hacked into uselessness. The concept of adversarial knowledge indexing was at this time new; PageRank was a novel and revolutionary solution.
Ad words spending had clear manipulations on the organic search algorithm. More spending meant better organic search placement. This is officially denied, but I saw this take place.
Having said that, I think it's clear the quality of non-ad search results isn't great, but I don't know if that's due to perverse incentives on Google's side or just the increasing sophistication of SEO defeating Google's relevance ranking.
It also describes the situation as it is now, not how it was when Google still cared about search results. The paid ads didn't use to be part of the search resuls list at all but instead were clearly delineated.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
To be candid, this might be the problem.
If we treated people with humanity and respect, we might not be so keen to throw them under the bus for a buck.
For Google (and others) you are the product even if you paid for it (Android).
It just so happens that their culture and employees value a “quality” that is distinctly incongruent with the wider 6b-person public. And also they completely dropped the ball on spam 10 years ago when (among other things) Matt Cutts left.
Don’t write off Google. They are an important case study of their own flavor of greed.
Future plc and their rooted in the 2000s, absolutely horrible website structure that is forced on every news outlet they own... bleh. Ancient mammoths need a good spanking.
(Surely, you jest?!)
That attention to technical detail and knowledge is why people like Der8auer have an audience today and people respect his opinion.
Without trackers and superfluous images, excessive CSS etc you could load a nice long article reasonably quickly. Text does not need to be split like that. It was done for $$$. Ars even offered a pagination escape hatch as a premium benefit at one point.
That’s the core of it. And too bad they’re off. Finding a news outlet that isn’t “tweeting” an article and isn’t a blog post on HN was great. And while they mention Tom’s hardware. It always felt (to me) less verbose where I needed it.
Fair well.