[Steuard]

I don't know how old you are, or whether you ever really knew the web in the prior era that we're talking about. Forgive me if I'm making flawed guesses about where you're coming from.

Back in the day, if I wanted the answer to some specific question about, say, restaurants in Chicago, I'd search for it on Google. Even if I didn't know enough about the topic to recognize the highest quality sites, it was okay, because the sorts of people who spent time writing websites about the Chicago restaurant scene did know enough, and they mostly linked to the high-quality sites, and that was the basis of how Google formed its rankings. Word of mouth only had to spread among deeply-invested experts (which happens quite naturally), and that was enough to allow search engines to send the broader public to the best resources. So yeah, once upon a time, search engines were pretty darn good at pointing people to high quality sites, and a lot of those quality sites became well-known in exactly that way.

[scarface_74]

I’m old enough that my first paid project was making modifications to a home grown Gopher server built using XCMDs for HyperCard.

My first post was on Usenet in 1994 using the “nn” newsreader

The web has gotten much larger than when it didn’t exist when I started.

But web rings on GeoCities weren’t exactly places to do “high quality research”. You still had to go to trusted sites you knew about or start at Wikipedia and go to citations.

Before two years ago I would go to Yelp. Now I use the paid version of ChatGPT that searches the internet and returns sources with links

https://imgur.com/a/hZwrjJS