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posted by n1 on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-have-been dept.

Right before HTTP took off in the early 1990's, there was Gopher and for a while it, too, was growing exponentially. It was fast and hosted text, source code, graphics, and any number of other types of files, just not all mixed together in one and the same document. For a while it was winning out over HTTP and making grounds against FTP. But that changed eventually and the rest is history. The MinnPost goes a bit into the history of Gopher with the Rise and Fall of the Gopher Protocol.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:18PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday August 13 2016, @03:18PM (#387511) Journal

    Wow, a lot of nostalgia here. Two things stood out to me from the article in particular:

    Some team members dreamed of fortune to go with their fame. But the internet was not yet open for business. It had been built on dot-mil and dot-edu, on public funds. Programmers shared source code; if you needed something, someone gave it to you. A dot-com address was considered crass. It was “as though all of TV was PBS,” Lindner says. “No commercials.”

    In today's revenue-obsessed "maximize your clicks!" ad-ridden nightmare of the WWW, it's so refreshing to remember what things were like back in the 1990s, when all there was was content. It may have been good or bad, but it was primarily about the content.

    McCahill pushed for a full-text search engine — something we now take for granted — and borrowed the gist of one from a computer system called NeXT, which had recently been invented by Steve Jobs.

    Actually, I don't take a "full-text search engine" for granted anymore these days. Most search engines use such complex algorithms to "make search easier" for idiots that it's frequently impossible to search the actual full-text anymore. And that's even if you get past all the "helpful" autocorrect features which actually take what I correctly typed and make it wrong.

    Google, despite still having the best results for most things, is a true pain in the neck in this regard. And no, before someone chimes in with a helpful suggestion about using "verbatim," verbatim search fails to bring up all relevant results in all sorts of cases (and sometimes appears to bring up results where the word or phrase aren't present). You'll generally get what seems to be an arbitrary subset of all the possible results that should come up with a "verbatim" search (if it worked the way it claims). Search the Google product forums, and you'll see plenty of discussion about this problem.

    (FYI, for those who actually want to try to approximate full-text search on Google, "verbatim" is quite buggy, and the "+" operator was deprecated years ago for those of you still trying to use it. Your best bet is to try "intext:" or "allintext:" operators, but even those fail to bring up consistent results. Most people these days just have given up on using search the way you used to back in the 1990s, where you could actually isolate a handful of documents or even a single document by just finding a short string of unique words. I tend to search for fairly obscure things when doing research, and I try to use search engines like this since it's the most efficient way to find stuff, but Google is hopelessly broken for that now. Heck, try a Google Books search and restrict by dates. Depending on the exact date range you choose, you'll get different verbatim results for the same years, e.g., 1900-1910 and 1900-1920 will bring up different results for the period of 1900-1910. Almost all the Google operators behave in weird buggy ways these days, though you only tend to see it when you search for something so specific that only a few documents fit the bill. There's just no way to do a convenient "full-text search" anymore in Google and guarantee consistent results.)

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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:46PM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:46PM (#387631) Homepage

    I think you're also taking modern web search engines for granted. If you really did a "full-text" web search, you'd get back petabytes of junk. The "smart" searching does get in the way sometimes, but a dumb text search would just give you billions of websites hawking Vigra. I'm not even joking. Modern search engine know to ignore that, and the presence of web spam has disappeared for most people, but all it takes is stepping outside of the comfort of modern search to land you in a sea of Vigra ads.

    And I'm misspelling Vigra because SN's spam filter is shitty. But just like modern search engines, I'm sure that inconvenience keeps out a ton of shit.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 13 2016, @09:59PM (#387633)

      Don't buy Vi­agra from my site, because I don't sell Vi­agra.

    • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:09PM

      by Geotti (1146) on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:09PM (#387645) Journal

      The "smart" searching does get in the way sometimes, but a dumb text search would just give you billions of websites hawking Vigra.

      It seems like your search-fu is below average. Would you like to enroll in an introductory course on boolean logic?

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday August 14 2016, @01:24PM

        by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 14 2016, @01:24PM (#387846) Journal

        It seems like your search-fu is below average. Would you like to enroll in an introductory course on boolean logic?

        Search engines don't do that any more. That's one of AthanasiusKircher 's points about search engines nowadays. If you dig around on the search interface for any given search engine, you can usually find one or two clicks away the details about what is still working. But boolean, proximity, and patterns are usually not supported any more.

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        Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
        • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday August 15 2016, @04:33PM

          by Geotti (1146) on Monday August 15 2016, @04:33PM (#388247) Journal

          Right.

          Le'ts recap while simplifying:

          - GP wants "dumb" search engines back

          - darkfeline says: "If you really did a "full-text" web search, you'd get back petabytes of junk. "

          - I make the point that using specific operands with "dumb" search engines would let you avoid the petabytes of junk.

          (Whoever modded your post informative, when the whole discussion is exactly about being able to do proper searches again and not the crippled, autosuggested BS of today's search engines (Google in particular, of course).)