Absent thoughts 1

Absent thoughts :

I noticed the other day that the name kindle is clever but also brutal. On one hand, the act of kindling joy and such in a reader is fantastic. But the logo of the device tells a different story. The boy that sits on the tree, is reading a book… which is made of trees. And in that context, where does the kindling come from? Probably the tree.

I've written before about how the internet feels like a shell of what it used to be. Lately, I've been encountering more and more of this. Search engines used to be heralded as the definitive way to get access to quick and reliable information. I can't say that's been my experience now. Gleaming past the "featured snippets" and the "people also asked" sponsored sections, it feels like the information just isn't there;. The first couple of pages of searches are either ads or extremely poorly written SEO content-baits. It isn't hard to find "relevant" information, no. The problem is that these "relevant" articles are poorly written and information-scarce articles created with the sole intent of cramming in as many buzzwords as possible. I've found myself needing to search in a specific website to get reliable results. Searching for hearing aids on google, nets around 7 actual results in the first page.

This is a far cry of how google felt when it arrived in the scene competing with lycos, ask jeeves, and yahoo.

Though we have alternatives, it feels as if they're even poorer in their results. Often suffering from the same malignent SEO-traps. Bing is even worse in searches, because the first page of searching hearing aids nets you 4 actual links to website- the rest is forced widgets inserting maps, images, videos, and related searches. Duck duck go does a better job at 10 results in the first page, though it manages to squeeze in its own widgets among them. I've had the same experience with Ecosia (another search engine that promises security/privacy).

Among them all, it looks like Startpage was the only one not riddled with ads. This is not to say that the results from Startpage will be more authentic and related. It's very likely that it, too, suffers from SEO-buzzwordy results, but that's yet to be seen. At least I can be certain that I will see more results and fewer ads.

I think it'd be nice to do a more thorough look at search engines and their effectiveness. My cursory search definitely left me feeling that the bigger names do not actually function better- they're just more well known.

The prevalence of this trend on the internet as a whole is very upsetting. The bigger websites feel less authentic. The more we push towards efficiency and capitalizing the internet, the more hollow it feels.