The Internet has been shrinking massively. My earliest experiences with the Internet were discovering the world of hobby OS dev around the turn of the millennium, when I chanced upon someone’s personal website talking about their OS, with source code and screenshots and dedicated forum. My mind was blown. I spent two years finding hundreds of small websites dedicated to the topic, hung out on IRC communities with other teenage OS nerds like me, and of course participated in the nascent osdev.org forum. To note that all of those websites were readily found through Google, and interlinked with their own topic webrings.

Today everything has disappeared or has been conglomerated into siloes, sanitised, focusing on engagement. You have YouTube videos about it (which is more cheap entertainment than actual education), you get some posts here once in a while, there’s Reddit where all intelligent discussion goes to die. IRC is a wasteland of idle bouncers. Then the LLMs arrived to kill what is left.

Who says the Internet is a vibrant place today mistakes flashiness with depth. It’s all empty calories, just makes you hungry for more, never satisfies.

Try Marginalia. It's a breath of fresh air. It probably won't find what you're looking for because whatever you're looking for probably doesn't exist in the small web.

That's 100% correct. Since Google's "helpful content update" Webmasters get massive amounts of "Crawled, not indexed" reports for anything Google considers "more of the same" or "thin content". If you're not an authority on a subject, simply meaning: you already rank for similar content, or if you don't get links from more popular domains, your content is in the abyss.

It's all under the guise of "We're fighting SPAM", but the algorithm (or model) they use is heavily skewed towards intents (actions) and brands (because they 'trust' big names).

And it's not working.

A simple, short informative blog about a tool you used that could be of interest to max. 100 people on this planet is no longer getting ranked, if it gets indexed at all.

Those posts tick all boxes: no incoming links, no authority, thin content.

It changes somewhat between "Google Updates", but it's pretty clear that it's no longer working.

Multiply the 100 people not finding that post by millions of queries and it's now a big problem for Google.

My dad asked me the other day if Google got worse because smaller companies are not paying Google enough money.

He didn't see any difference between ads and content, because all results are now big brands only.

"Helpful content" is such a misnomer. It removes all helpful content in favour of AI overviews and only shows intent-driven, commercial content.

We're watching the end of Google's hegemony for sure.

About 15 years ago, I won a phone in a contest. Last week I tried to find information about it, but I couldn't. No AI, nor Google could find anything the contest I won it in. When people say "the internet is forever" that can certainly be true, but it isn't for everything.

Kagi

They're so horrible that I've started defaulting to their AI summaries. And I hate those summaries. It's just that the regular results are so terrible now, and seemingly getting worse at a noticeable pace.

I used to not worry. I was sure that a competitor would come along and fix search. But the longer that's not happening, the more nervous I'm getting that we'll actually lose search. If a few more years pass in the current state, I'm afraid the majority of people will forget what search was like and default to AI summaries.

I've tried alternatives, including Kagi (not actually relevant because there's no way I'm – directly or indirectly – buying Russian products) and Uruky, but they're not good enough.

(Edit: Added "directly or indirectly" about Kagi to point out that I'm not claiming that Kagi itself is Russian.)

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