I don't understand what you're getting at. This thread concerns how we used to be able to find good information with these contraptions called search engines, so that word of mouth was not the only way information was found.
What I’m getting at is simple, no one is going to find a random persons obscure blog where they are trying to build a “brand” or be a “thought leader” that is not on the first page of search results.
I subscribe to Ben Thompson’s writing and make it habit to go to a few other websites because they have earned my trust.
The only method that most people have ever had of gaining traction is via word of mouth and not
through search engines.
No one owes you traffic or discoverability any more than they owed HuffPost or the other click bait, SEO optimized websites before the algorithm changes
I don't know how old you are, or whether you ever really knew the web in the prior era that we're talking about. Forgive me if I'm making flawed guesses about where you're coming from.
Back in the day, if I wanted the answer to some specific question about, say, restaurants in Chicago, I'd search for it on Google. Even if I didn't know enough about the topic to recognize the highest quality sites, it was okay, because the sorts of people who spent time writing websites about the Chicago restaurant scene did know enough, and they mostly linked to the high-quality sites, and that was the basis of how Google formed its rankings. Word of mouth only had to spread among deeply-invested experts (which happens quite naturally), and that was enough to allow search engines to send the broader public to the best resources. So yeah, once upon a time, search engines were pretty darn good at pointing people to high quality sites, and a lot of those quality sites became well-known in exactly that way.
I’m old enough that my first paid project was making modifications to a home grown Gopher server built using XCMDs for HyperCard.
My first post was on Usenet in 1994 using the “nn” newsreader
The web has gotten much larger than when it didn’t exist when I started.
But web rings on GeoCities weren’t exactly places to do “high quality research”. You still had to go to trusted sites you knew about or start at Wikipedia and go to citations.
Before two years ago I would go to Yelp. Now I use the paid version of ChatGPT that searches the internet and returns sources with links
