I wanted to touch upon one weird casualty, if you will, of the modern
web: search. Search engines have gotten better and worse since the
late 1990s. They've gotten better at weeding out SEO hacks like
repeating the same keywords over and over in order to improve their
page rank. They've done better, usually, at finding what the searcher
wants. I almost never have to go to the second or further search
results of pages. That's good.

What's not good is the lack of options and forced results that take
away power from the searcher and essentially restricts information.
Basically if you want to search for something obscure and/or specific
that is not popular by any means, you're going to have a bad time.
Most search engines I encounter do not have the AND/OR operator
keywords anymore. There is no "advanced" search beyond putting a key
phrase in quotation marks or a must-include shorthand. It's maddening.

I would love to be able to look up an old local-ish TV show, but
because of the name being shared by a much more popular piece of
music, I can't really find anything on it. It's two words so that
doesn't help, but even adding "tv show" to the search yields nothing
relevant. These "genius" search engines just discard what they choose
because it was only in 3,000 results instead of 3.8 billion, and even
when it prompts you to must-include it, it STILL gives you mostly
garbage results from the previous search... or nothing at all.

Now even when I'm searching for YT videos, using a Gopher proxy[0] no
less, it still gives me garbage results halfway down the page about US
politics that CLEARLY have nothing to do with my search terms. Are you
fucking kidding me? I mean the site proper gives me even more
ridiculous results that hides anything more than the Top 3 "real"
results... personalized for me.

And that's one more thing I can't stand. I will punch in almost
verbatim (missing a few articles or conjunctions) the name of a video
I either saw before or saw mentioned by title somewhere else, and I
will STILL not get the requested video as A search result. Not THE
search result, not the 3rd search result, but it won't even fucking
show up because it was from 10+ years ago. Recency bias in search
results on that site are awful, although "normal" search engines
aren't much better.

When you realize the reason why search results often don't make sense,
wanting to push engagement or someone threw money at the search
provider to get their site/video more clicks, and it's just
disgusting. It's maddening. I'm not sure which is worse: curated,
commercialized results that usually get things right, or unadulterated
results that are generally like an inverse minefield where the
information you want is surrounded by dozens of duds. Probably the
former is better, but I wish you had more control like before.

0. gopher://codemadness.org/7/idiotbox.cgi