Was there ever a time? In the late 80s and early 90s when it was mostly text only, there really wasn’t a whole lot of content, and bandwidth sucked massively.
Once connection speeds improved, we got banner ads, popups, and noisy flash animations, all of which were vectors to install viruses.
Then came google, facebook and amazon, and monopolized the web.
Every era sucked in its own right. But I’m rather using it now where plenty of other educated people develop countermeasures that work out of the box, rather than having to fiddle around with browser configurations to block ads and malware myself.
There’s less info now than a few years ago and it’s harder to find. Web 2.0 has put most of the data and traffic into just a few hands. And as we can see with Twitter that can lead to a significant part of the Internet going to shit overnight.
Hell, most of us are here because of what reddit did overnight. It’s certainly better than the age of web rings but we’ve entered a downturn.
Agree, especially with the getting harder to find part. I’ve followed some other user’s recommendation and have been using kagi.com for the last 2 weeks as my search engine of choice, and it’s really way ahead of google these days. I’m still in the free tier but about to hit the ceiling this week, and I’m rather certain I’ll end up paying for it before I go back to google.
The results are about on par with Goolge ~2022. No ads, no trackers, and most of the SEO garbage that’s targeting google (and maybe bing?) is by and large disregarded. Worth a try for sure.
Hold up there… HTLM wasn’t even invented until 1991 by Timothy Berners-Lee who then made the first web server, web browser, and web page. It was another two or three years before browsing the web became more common. Before then, the internet was very basic, consisted of a few simple services, and was typically only accessible via universities and large corporations.
Regular people often only had access to regional online services until national services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL came along.
The internet existed pre-web. Email, Usenet, IRC, Archie, etc. the real difference between ARPANET and the Internet was the introduction of TCP/IP packet handling and CIX which unified ISPs, but those both came pre-1991.
Was there ever a time? In the late 80s and early 90s when it was mostly text only, there really wasn’t a whole lot of content, and bandwidth sucked massively.
Once connection speeds improved, we got banner ads, popups, and noisy flash animations, all of which were vectors to install viruses.
Then came google, facebook and amazon, and monopolized the web.
Every era sucked in its own right. But I’m rather using it now where plenty of other educated people develop countermeasures that work out of the box, rather than having to fiddle around with browser configurations to block ads and malware myself.
TL;DR: Use adblock.
There’s less info now than a few years ago and it’s harder to find. Web 2.0 has put most of the data and traffic into just a few hands. And as we can see with Twitter that can lead to a significant part of the Internet going to shit overnight.
Hell, most of us are here because of what reddit did overnight. It’s certainly better than the age of web rings but we’ve entered a downturn.
Agree, especially with the getting harder to find part. I’ve followed some other user’s recommendation and have been using kagi.com for the last 2 weeks as my search engine of choice, and it’s really way ahead of google these days. I’m still in the free tier but about to hit the ceiling this week, and I’m rather certain I’ll end up paying for it before I go back to google.
The results are about on par with Goolge ~2022. No ads, no trackers, and most of the SEO garbage that’s targeting google (and maybe bing?) is by and large disregarded. Worth a try for sure.
99% of the time I just want a wikipedia summary, i just search wikipedia directly now and have done for years
Hold up there… HTLM wasn’t even invented until 1991 by Timothy Berners-Lee who then made the first web server, web browser, and web page. It was another two or three years before browsing the web became more common. Before then, the internet was very basic, consisted of a few simple services, and was typically only accessible via universities and large corporations.
Regular people often only had access to regional online services until national services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL came along.
Yep, ARPAnet and some messaging boards pre-90’s. Slow as hell and limited content, that’s what I mean.
The internet existed pre-web. Email, Usenet, IRC, Archie, etc. the real difference between ARPANET and the Internet was the introduction of TCP/IP packet handling and CIX which unified ISPs, but those both came pre-1991.
At least now I can watch porn without it turning out to be that middle eastern dude getting his head cut off
Use Ublock origin as it blocks malicious sites.