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.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday August 13 2016, @11:09PM
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
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.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday August 15 2016, @04:33PM
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).)