Trivium

Tue Aug 20 05:29:38 UTC 2013

I'm curious; do people really think that the difference in material
indexed between Google, Yahoo/Bing, and others is really that
big?  I don't mean the heuristics and algorithms used to return
the results in a particularly useful order; I mean the sheer raw
set of indexed pages.  I don't debate that Google found a
particularly useful page ranking system; but I question the
notion that the loss of Google was akin to the loss of your
root directory.

Matt

On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
>
> > > Without Google, how do you know where anything even *is*?
> >
> > ask that to 20% of the world's population
>
>
> Turning off  Google is essentially doing a  rm -rf  http://
> www-wide analog to  rm -rf /    or  temporarily loss of the root directory,
> pending a fsck.
>
> The important stuff is still there, somewhere...  it's just becomes a real
> chore to get to your files without a useful directory  provided by the
> indexing system,  until you can get your superblock repaired.
>
> Webcrawler, Gopher sites, and Archie search engine become viable options.
>
>
> There's also backup on some stacks of tapes somewhere labelled  Bing, DMOZ,
> Yahoo,  and a few other misc.  unlabelled stacks, various well-known .COM
> and .EDU domains,  which  you could probably use to find your materials if
> you downloaded the old Hosts.txt files;  if you look long and hard enough,
>   you can still find the filesystem data you need to relink the directory
> and get at the files you need;   it  can just be darn inconvenient  sorting
> out all the spam.
>
>
> randy
> >
>
> --
> -JH
>
>