Comment by Juraph

1 year ago

Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type).

I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.

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Juraph

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mrkramer  1 year ago

I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.

  • sotix  1 year ago

    Kagi small web and Marginalia do a pretty good job. Even the regular Kagi search delivers smaller blogs in my results frequently that end up being very useful to resolve what I had searched for.

  • zelphirkalt  1 year ago

    Perhaps there is some space for community projects that collect links to blogs and tag them and build a simple search for that. Does it perhaps exist?

    • mrkramer  1 year ago

      Last time I searched on Google for some decent blog search engine I couldn't find one. People say Google Custom Search is good, you can also see Marginalia and Kagi getting mentioned a lot. I didn't try neither of them, well except Marginalia but I think Marginalia prefers text only search results but modern blogs are not text only. There was good HN blog search project[0] but it is dead now.

      I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts.

      I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me.

      [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149