If you've missed all the HN love for it over the past while, there's a search engine here: https://search.marginalia.nu/
which is trying to achieve just that
I get this metric but at what point is the cutoff? If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements, do they then get deranked on the search engine that led people there?
> If a small home run website has good info and gets popular, and has to add more advertisements
More advertisements? Any advertisements make the site worse. More makes it more worse.
It's so inexpensive to have a website these days, even one that pulls in a substantial number of visitors, that it's hard to make an argument that ads are necessary to pay for hosting.
Oh for sure, just a hypothetical lol. And idk maybe you write software or something that you want to keep as free as you can, so ads make it doable to sustain that. There’s any number of valid reasons to advertise, and if it’s a site for content I support I’ll probably turn of ublock so long as the ads aren’t overwhelming or obstructing
That's kind of the point of wiby (the site that's doing the randomization in this post). They only index web 1.0 stuff.
Not quite sure what their definition of that is, since I've seen recently updated things. Without CSS? Without JS? Maybe just websites that never make a JS fetch request once they're loaded.
That speaks more to the gentrification of search engines and their results rather than the loss of small, independent websites.
Once upon a time, I could search for something on Yahoo or Google and get nothing but those kinds of websites in search results, even when some central repository sites like Wikipedia were starting to take root.
Everything changed when the SEO nation attacked, and nobody expected the social media inquisition.
It's both. Loss of discoverability leads to ecological collapse of personal website. There's little point when the only reader is destined to be its own author.
Period true search methods (webrings, curated indexes, portals and early search engines) are gone and so is the fighting chance for this kind of projects.
