You know what the worst part is? We watched the internet go from a mostly ad-free place to where it is now, where ads are so pervasive it is difficult to find things that are not just advertising, so we know it doesn't have to be this way. But the society outside the internet is just as bad, only it's been that way our entire lives so we think it is normal.
There was a glorious time when the first page of search results would have been at least half filled with hits to other people with personal web sites who had the same hobby. Yes, the commercialization of the web sucks balls for people who know what we've lost.
So, you'd just like people to provide this material to you for free -- as well as the engine that lets you find them.
Me, I googled "how cuckoo clocks work" and got a page full of answers. Some of them are sites selling parts, but the specific pages answer the question. Who would I expect to have that information, aside from the people selling the parts?
One, of course, is Wikipedia, which would have been my first stop anyway. It's the best site for generic "learn about X" questions on most topics.
The way I see it, the alternative to an ads-based internet is no internet at all. Or at best, a vastly smaller one -- not just smaller because fewer people wanted to put up their content for free (and having to pay for the hosting), but even smaller because it would lose its status as the go-to place to do anything at all.
Maybe it's just because I'm of exactly that age where I wasn't born with the Internet but it hadn't yet become so commonplace as to feel like an entitlement. I'm constantly amazed at how much I can get for free, or at the cost of a small bit of attention.
I'd just as soon find a better way than ads, but nobody has perfected that kind of micropayments -- the $.02 that I'd be willing to pay for reading somebody's blog page, if and only if it turned out to be interesting. I'm glad we've gotten past the point where pages were unreadable because the ads were so very impolite. The compromise seems reasonably good to me.
Same search with noncommercial lens applied in Kagi Search (it is a paid, ad-free search engine but that looks like it wouldn't be the problem given your frustration level with Google ;)
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 14.0 ms ] threadWordle is a miniature showcase of what's possible on the modern Web without all the modern-Web bullshit.
Me, I googled "how cuckoo clocks work" and got a page full of answers. Some of them are sites selling parts, but the specific pages answer the question. Who would I expect to have that information, aside from the people selling the parts?
One, of course, is Wikipedia, which would have been my first stop anyway. It's the best site for generic "learn about X" questions on most topics.
The way I see it, the alternative to an ads-based internet is no internet at all. Or at best, a vastly smaller one -- not just smaller because fewer people wanted to put up their content for free (and having to pay for the hosting), but even smaller because it would lose its status as the go-to place to do anything at all.
Maybe it's just because I'm of exactly that age where I wasn't born with the Internet but it hadn't yet become so commonplace as to feel like an entitlement. I'm constantly amazed at how much I can get for free, or at the cost of a small bit of attention.
I'd just as soon find a better way than ads, but nobody has perfected that kind of micropayments -- the $.02 that I'd be willing to pay for reading somebody's blog page, if and only if it turned out to be interesting. I'm glad we've gotten past the point where pages were unreadable because the ads were so very impolite. The compromise seems reasonably good to me.
https://cln.sh/bNpnGo