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 <mysi...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Randy Bush <ra...@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 > >
