I forgot how this worked until I discovered NeoCities. I suddenly remenbered when so many personal websites would have some page that's like "links" or "sites I love" or "other cool people", etc. And it was just a curated list of sites the author thought were neat.

And your bookmark function was actually really helpful, because "web surfing" was literally jumping from link to link to link, following rabbitholes and breadcrumb trails across the web.

Nowadays, I bookmark things but I never go back through them. I know Firefox sometimes automatically helps you remember stuff in your bookmarks though.

But there was a time when it felt like finding some niche site was a sort of secret club or cool treasure, and you had to make sure you could find your way back. :)

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[-] Landslide7648@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 6 months ago

Can’t blame anyone but yourself if you use Google tbh

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[-] RandysGut@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago

I searched for Magic The Gathering cards earlier on my phone (FireFox mobile), and got YouTube shorts in the results. This was in addition to a large amount of useless info panels and junk in the search results. I just wanted the official links or even an Amazon URL to the upcoming precons, not slowly regurgitated info!

[-] Gondolaaaa@lemmy.world 14 points 6 months ago

I use DDG at home, or Bing at work, for most topics they auto generate cards that give you the answer from the get go like 70% of the time

[-] maus@sh.itjust.works 12 points 6 months ago

Must be an old screenshot because there's now half a page of Gemini AI garbage at the very top now.

Highly recommend using the uBlacklist extensions to filter out the garbage, spam, copycat, useless sites that somehow seem to always beat out legitimate sources in SEO.

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.world 11 points 6 months ago

Because Google decided years ago that relevancy is less important than profitability.

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[-] apotheotic@beehaw.org 11 points 6 months ago

I don't mean to sour the funny, because it is funny/sad indeed, but

If you know you want the info from the official docs, why not do a search that forces results from that site, or search just for the official docs and then find the page you're after on the docs themselves?

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[-] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 9 points 6 months ago

It would be funny, if it weren’t painfully true. DuckDuckGo sucks just as bad as Google. I hear there is a good search engine, but it costs money to use. Shocking. Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.

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[-] pkill@programming.dev 9 points 6 months ago

don't use Google, problem solved

[-] joe_cool@lemmy.ml 8 points 6 months ago

While I don't miss checking the index of my wall of Microsoft books (the light gray binders with the squishy plastic). At least those were (mostly^1^) correct and ad free.

Then the future began and you got MSDN subscription on CD with sample code. Woohoo.