I've become a paranoid link hoarder because of this.
I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past:
- There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before.
- The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller.
- Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.)
It's extremely hard to find good content, even though _i know_ it is out there. Sometimes it's even hard to find sites I visited before, but I only remembered vague keywords.
And this is true especially for content that is of educational nature or interesting punditry. You know, the stuff that comes directly from people who have expertise and have earned a grounded opinion.
This is why I'm hoarding links to all sorts of interesting things. It's not an efficient way to do it and I don't know if there's a more general solution here. Very unfortunate.
Maybe it would be neat if there was a place online people could hoard, archive, and share their link troves. I know I’d be interested in that. A lot of this type of content becomes unmaintained and rots badly.
I like the idea of collaborative curation of quality web sources. I think it's a fundamentally hard problem, but my hunch is that many people do this anyway in some form or another.
You could argue that the web is exactly that - each page curates links to other pages - that's why pagerank worked so well in the early days for search.
The problem is keeping the SEO bots out.
So the challenge becomes how to scale a collaborative platform while keeping out the bad actors.
Are.na is an attempt at this, and I think has built up a decent community around it. Basically link/file storage + ability to navigate to other people’s lists storing the same link.
I don’t think it supports auto-archiving, though you could probably use it in conjunction with pinboard for that.
I agree with your observations. The time is just right for a Google search killer. There might be some AI in it, but the fundamental goal should be a massive increase of the SNR of search results.
For me, this has been perplexity.ai. Give it a query, it expands that into multiple queries (possibly chained depending on results) and synthesizes the results into an answer with citations.
Kagi's done that for me. Most is prefiltered and setting some domains to never appear again sorts out remaining spam. No generative AI, would recommend. The SNR is amazing compared to google.
On the other hand like the sibling comment mentions, perplexity is great at digging out obscure stuff sometimes. Provide enough details and use the pro type search and you may be surprised.
QR codes got a second lease on life. Although they remained common in industrial use, they fell out of popular use almost a decade ago. Their resurgence is one of the few persistent, positive social changes to come out of the pandemic.
I've become the same. I quickly realized that when I find a good article, I can almost never find it again later, even in my Chrome/Google history, so I've taken to immediately bookmarking everything I need later.
Chrome history search has always been very bad compared to Firefox. I don't know why, it's just text search over titles, but on Chrome you can never find squat. I always suspected it is on purpose, they want users to just use Google all the time.
My paranoia has grown from link hoarding to storing PDF dumps of sites that are really important to me. There've been so many times over the years that amazing resources just blip out of existence.
I'm Pretty Sure these things are true in comparison to the past:
- There is much more high quality content on the web than was ever before.
- The signal to noise ratio is _much_ smaller.
- Search results are getting cluttered by SEO spam, some of which is straight up copying from organic social media style sites (forums, SO, reddit, Github issues etc.)
It's extremely hard to find good content, even though _i know_ it is out there. Sometimes it's even hard to find sites I visited before, but I only remembered vague keywords.
And this is true especially for content that is of educational nature or interesting punditry. You know, the stuff that comes directly from people who have expertise and have earned a grounded opinion.
This is why I'm hoarding links to all sorts of interesting things. It's not an efficient way to do it and I don't know if there's a more general solution here. Very unfortunate.