The Mosaic browser (1993) had full text history search.
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
That and google had a major interest in killing bookmarks. Bookmarks were actively competing with google search traffic, so they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them. Why bookmark something when you can just search for it.
Eh, it's true that Google's incentives aren't really aligned with bookmarking tools, but the magnitude of the effect is much less than you're thinking of. Basically 100% of Google's revenues come from commercial-seeking queries, cases where the user has a purchasing intent before they came to the search engine. All of the non-commercial uses - coding, random facts, research, education, navigational queries, etc - are just loss-leaders so that your fingers automatically reach for Google when you're searching for lawyers, contractors, home-improvement fixtures, apps, furniture, flowers, restaurants, consumer electronics, etc. Google (of the 2010s certainly, but also true now) considered Amazon to be its primary competition, not Yahoo or del.icio.us.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
In my experience, those commercial seeking queries are what google can't do. Many stores in the result ship to USA only, and there's also no good way to compare prices and features.
Google used to not have any ads for many years while they got market share. Then only small ads off to the side. Eventually the ads moved inline and were half the results, etc.
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
Are you sure you don't have any privacy protections enabled?
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
econ · · focus · HN ↗
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
bognition · · focus · HN ↗
nostrademons · · focus · HN ↗
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
n_plus_1_acc · · focus · HN ↗
elcritch · · focus · HN ↗
dragonwriter · · focus · HN ↗
Which explains why they push an AI Summary to the top of most searches which discourages clicking on any of the search results.
Or not.
elcritch · · focus · HN ↗
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
miki123211 · · focus · HN ↗
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.