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 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).)