Dead Internet theory

slant

slant

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Just a question. If Google is constantly crawling and indexing websites why are there only like 20 pages of results for anything you search? Years ago you could get to page 400. Same thing with Google images. It's like the huge chunks of internet they are indexing they are refusing to link to.

This is basically the tip of the whole "dead Internet theory" iceberg you can get into. There are a lot of cool video essays on YouTube about it.

Anyone else noticed this complete degradation of the Internet? Seems to have gotten worse since 2014 or so.
 
slant said:
Just a question. If Google is constantly crawling and indexing websites why are there only like 20 pages of results for anything you search? Years ago you could get to page 400. Same thing with Google images. It's like the huge chunks of internet they are indexing they are refusing to link to.

This is basically the tip of the whole "dead Internet theory" iceberg you can get into. There are a lot of cool video essays on YouTube about it.

Anyone else noticed this complete degradation of the Internet? Seems to have gotten worse since 2014 or so.
Click to expand...


It's because of the way Google (and search engines that copy them) works. They made more changes in the 20-teens that made it worse.

Essentially, the search engine is censoring. They no longer work the way they did in the 90s and 00s when search terms would give you accurate results and pages of results.

Websites stopped using keywords on images because of these changes, too.

I have posted about this in greater detail in the past and shared it in different places, but I cannot remember the specifics anymore, and I don't want to look it up right now. I really miss old search engines, though, and going deep down rabbit holes on the internet. A truly radical search engine would bring back the old way.
 
Didn't help that after 2020 everything has more or less fallen off a cliff between the huge numbers of bot accounts on all the popular platforms and the whole mouse utopia thing going on with the population having gone npc mode. As for the memory hole this is why you screen shot and download anything of interest or use otherwise it is lost forever at some point.
 
Roses In The Vineyard said:
Didn't help that after 2020 everything has more or less fallen off a cliff between the huge numbers of bot accounts on all the popular platforms and the whole mouse utopia thing going on with the population having gone npc mode. As for the memory hole this is why you screen shot and download anything of interest or use otherwise it is lost forever at some point.
Click to expand...

Yup, I keep PDFs of pages I want to reread later, too.
 
Maybe it will end up media controlled what we get to see.
 
There were always a few consistent pockets of the internet, and they're still around:

Wikipedia (for better or worse)
Internet Archive
Sites which compile a lot of historical information (eg newadvent)

Google used to be a search engine. Now it's more of a recommendation engine.
 
slant said:
Just a question. If Google is constantly crawling and indexing websites why are there only like 20 pages of results for anything you search? Years ago you could get to page 400. Same thing with Google images. It's like the huge chunks of internet they are indexing they are refusing to link to.

This is basically the tip of the whole "dead Internet theory" iceberg you can get into. There are a lot of cool video essays on YouTube about it.

Anyone else noticed this complete degradation of the Internet? Seems to have gotten worse since 2014 or so.
Click to expand...
Nope. Not just you. A lot of Xennials like myself that grew up with the internet at the same time as we did have a similar experience as well. There's an insane amount of actual content out there, but it's either paywalled, limited access, closed behind intranets or secluded directly within non-indexible "sites"/platforms like discord. Personally, I think internet searching has already become a thing of the past. I find myself doing 90% of my searches directly on Reddit, and if I have a very specific topic related discourse I want to engage in, I specifically seek out an official, or unofficial discord of said topic. Like for music production, diabetes, specific games and other things. I find much more well informed/personal answers on populated discords (that are well moderated with really knowledgeable ppl) instead of using Google/Bing and going to websites.

With the rise of conversational AI, I think "searching" for content through search engines will pretty much die within a few years - once the older generations that are still dependent on them start weening themselves off of them as well. I have downloaded a few AI models locally on my desktop to play around with, and once hardware catches up to the steep requirements, that will be my permanent go to. If you know what you're doing with AI, it gives you answers that are roughly 80-95% accurate most of the times. This also includes software/platform/content suggestions as to like .. for example .. I was searching for TTTS software and getting hard bricked by Google because of their ads and really bad search indexing. I asked Chat GPT to list me several options, and I got them instantaneously and followed my way directly to the websites and found what I was looking for much faster. Same goes for research topics etc.
 
You might be interested in:

https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/

Despite the URL, it's not an AI product, but a collection of sources of text created prior to the "death" of the internet in the ChatGPT era. The website is still more of a moodboard than anything.

Search engine discussion above also reminded me of:

Marginalia Search

search.marginalia.nu is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.
search.marginalia.nu

which is a search engine that tries to be old-school and serve content from small, indie sites rather than SEO garbage.
 
David54 said:
Duck,Duck, Go
Click to expand...
Funnily enough, DuckDuckGo is now indexed using google's database as its source so it is pretty much the same thing. I am going to a post a more in depth video about it in a minute here but didn't want to put a link in this post lest you think is specifically directed at you which it is not
 

This is actually the video which inspired this thread which is much better than anything I could have thrown together. It is a compilation of like this guys 4 part long video so just a warning its like 2+ hours but kind of like a podcast you listen to while you work. I don't agree with everything this guy is saying but it was very illuminating in a lot of ways
 
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