You want evidence? Search for a plumber/tradesperson in your area THEN try to find rational discourse about your options. There are literally 100s of results of websites remixing a small set of data, presenting it to you, and asking you to buy something to see more, when you know there is nothing behind the scenes.
This type of engine would punish these sites, in theory, and may turn up a discussion in some forum, newsgroup, etc. that is actually relevant, or insightful.
> Search for a plumber/tradesperson in your area THEN try to find rational discourse about your options.
I searched "plumber Austin TX" in Google and got a map and list of company websites near me. There are a lot of "top x y in z" list sites, but the top results were still the most relevant. I don't know what "rational discourse" I'm expected to find, though, or why I should assume the discourse I would find through Google is less rational than discourse I would find elsewhere.
I searched the same thing in OP and found nothing even remotely significant. Not even anything related to plumbing.
OP's project isn't optimized for relevance, it's optimized for nostalgia - providing a filter that keeps the modern web away and dropping quirky, interesting breadcrumbs to distract you and remind you of what it was like to wander around the web of the 90's.
Which is all well and good if that's what you want, and judging from the comments it is what a lot of people here want, but Google giving me a list of company names, numbers, websites and a map showing their location by distance is more useful, even if it uses "modern web design" and javascript.
> I searched "plumber Austin TX" in Google and got a map and list of company websites near me.
I think you could have done this historically in a Yellow Pages phone book. My OP used "boring". A list of plumbers is boring, been done on dead wood. I'm not saying boring != !useful.
> There are a lot of "top x y in z" list sites
This is an understatement. I actually want to know the top x in y, to do that I need "rational discourse". Rational discourse is recognizable as well written, insightful, humble, reflective, self-countering, anecdotal etc. By "search is terrible" I mean with respect to finding this.
> OP's project isn't optimized for relevance, it's optimized for nostalgia
Nostalgia is highly relevant if it's on topic, but agreeing with you as to what this engine is about.
>Rational discourse is recognizable as well written, insightful, humble, reflective, self-countering, anecdotal etc. By "search is terrible" I mean with respect to finding this.
I believe a search engine that ignores results based on superficial and aesthetic qualities like "modern web design" would be even worse in that regard, unless you're assuming no relevant discourse about any subject has taken place on the web since the early 2000's.
I admit, I have no idea what heuristic you would actually use to find "well written, insightful, humble, reflective, self-countering, anecdotal etc" content, but I've seen it on modern sites (even on Twitter,) and I've seen a lot of garbage on old sites, so a simple text search of only old websites doesn't seem like it.
> I believe a search engine that ignores results based on superficial and aesthetic qualities like "modern web design" would be even worse in that regard
I think you may be confused. No one's trying to replace Google here. The idea is to have another option for when Google craps out on you. And if you find that Google almost always craps out on you, then hey, maybe you're in the 5–10% who have just found their new default search engine :-)
well it displays a map of plumbers in my area, is it not useful?
Besides do you remember what it was displaying before "it became useless"? This whole thread is full of hand wavy claims with pretty much no good examples about how Google actually became worse in time. Hence my point.
"I haven't seen a black swan, ergo it's not real."
I've been burned by this decline in the past.
From creepy results i.e. first suggestion before typing was something I spoke near the Android and I never searched for before; to not finding what I was searching for before successfully, Google has started declining.
It would be nice if you provided a few real examples so that we would see how Google was so fantastic and found everything magically but then went to shit.
Google Search is a fantastic product because it's essentially Spotlight for the web. It's by far the fastest way to get to things you already vaguely know are there and acts as a metasearch for large sites.
But as a result it's now less useful as a tool for scouring the web.
