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I needed to learn a bit about aquarium plants and substrates to plant them in. Searching Google was hopeless; all the results were links to commercial sites pushing their products along with the usual received wisdom.
I tried Marginalia, searching for 'aquarium soil' and 'aquarium plants', and got useful results in the first page. The first was from an early 90s Usenet group (a treasure trove in itself), and the other was from a site last updated 10 years ago, yet full of useful information and tips.
This search project interests me for a number of reasons, not least because I have tried something similar myself, albeit with a slightly different approach. The challenges are as relentless as the web is vast and varied.
But perhaps it's the usefulness from simplicity that I like the most. Ask a question of the index, get a direct answer. This was always how I used to search, back when the phrase 'search engine' was not a misnomer. I used single words and very short phrases, and I used '-' modifiers to exclude words (not something that Marginalia supports yet, but that's not much of an issue). You hone your results, and maybe find other stuff you hadn't thought about.
Even wiby.me seems to screw around with word associations when finding results. My phrase 'aquarium plants' returned a commercial site on aquarium plants, followed by something on 'aquarium', then some hits on 'plants', and some on 'tropical plants'. The results weren't bad, certainly better than Google's, but it made assumptions that didn't have to be made. I can hone my own queries, in fact I seem to recall that it was quite a fun thing to do.
One thing that concerns me is the apparent cliff-edge that authors seem to have fallen off around 2008-2015. So many interesting sites have not been updated in years, though there are still some that are actively maintained. Marginalia surfaces many old (though often still relevant) sites like that because they typically fit the criteria for inclusion in the index.
I've kind of assumed that good content is still being written elsewhere, just that it's difficult to find. But I wonder if that's even true? I wonder if people just get sucked into platforms like Medium, get tempted by get-rich-quick bullshit and wander off into the land of shills?
Perhaps we need to find some further heuristics to weed out the shill-sites among the big platforms like Medium, Wordpress, etc. (I don't even know what others there are!). Regardless, Medium smacks of so many shitty practices that it's probably difficult to crawl with any level of reliability. I might be wrong.
A response from someone I asked about why they stopped writing was that they just got too busy, and when their hosting provider shut down, they moved it and maintained it as an archive. What was interesting was that they said there was very little info on their niche when they originally created the site, but that there's much more now. Yet, when I looked, I didn't find much useful.
Are people intimidated by flashy well-presented sites to the point they assume their own experience and knowledge are somehow not worth writing about? It's not inconceivable.
And all this leads me to the possible conclusion that in order to have fresh non-commercial stuff to index, we might also need to provide new non-commercial platforms to publish on, and a reboot of the attitude that there's plenty worth writing about.