How web searches have changed
Remember Fravia?
I bought a computer magazine every month as a 13-14 year old (early 2000s) because technology fascinated me, still does.
I remember reading in this magazine the famous Steve Jobs commencement speech, Connecting the Dots. Iconic and highly inspirational.
I also remember reading about a hacker named Fravia.
He was one of the first people I remember being inspired by. I wanted to be a genius hacker/tinkerer like him.
I wish I could write and think like him.
He wrote about some amazing search tricks that could help you find anything on the web, back when it was highly unregulated and freer.
I think one of the tricks was to not use words like "what" or "how" when searching on Google. The reasoning was that Google's algorithm would return poor results that contained more of these words, instead of the main topic you wanted to search for. There were so many tricks like using quotes, plus, hyphen etc., to modify the searches, and using every available resource instead of just google. I felt like I discovered secret knowledge that nobody knew. Finding those tricks was also not as easy as it is today.
The algorithms today have advanced so much that most of these tricks are not as useful, and you automatically receive the relevant results. Everything is neat and tidy, and the user experience is calculated in advance.
I think using words like "what" or "how" in a search leads to more precise results today, because there is so much data online and the search is much smarter. Back then there weren't as many articles on as many different subjects, and search engines weren’t as good as they are today, so you had to rely on these tricks to find good information.
For most tasks you will find the exact thing if you just write the whole question in Google. Maybe not as precise as using some of these tricks, but they’re not really necessary.
It's fascinating to realize how much things change in 10-15 years. Has this always been the case, even when there were no computers, or electricity?