It's hard for me to pick a sweet spot for the internet in many ways I feel like I've grown up with it.
I can remember the web of circa 1995 to 1997 with Gif's that wouldn't render properly in internet explorer, HTML marquee scrolling text and the dreaded blink tag being used everywhere. You needed to play search engine bingo with Altavista, Metacrawler, Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos etc etc. And it was a crap shoot if search engines would give you useful results.
I can remember the web of 1998 to 2000 where every web developer seemed to discover html frames at the same time. We had good search with Google but pop up ads were so rife that the internet was borderline unusable. I can remember all the free webmail sites like hotmail, yahoo etc. ICQ chat was massive (whatever happened to that - it was a staple of my teen internet).
In Early 2000's Firefox came along and saved the internet by virtue of its built in popup blocking. But there was a mishmap of "Applets" and "Plugins" everywhere Flash Player, Java Applets, Real Player etc. Video (and audio) on the web was terrible half the time it would complain about missing codecs, it would buffer forever and if something did load it would be the size of a postage stamp and look pixelated as all hell. I remember Gmail came out and everyone went gaga over it's interface.
Last period that real stands out is the mid to late 00's with development of big Social Media sites, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. The web got more and more javascript heavy. Web video streaming finally became useable. Google Chrome came out and flash player finally died despite Microsoft trying to revive it with Silverlight.
I kind of feel like this last 10 years are a continuation with increased surveillance and tracking.
But it still doesn't defend not blocking sites that doesn't contain anything except autogenerated content.
And it still doesn't defend ignoring my keywords.
I think using +plus +before +keywords still works for situations when you don't want any words ignored?
Certainly agree it seems like they could do a better job of burying auto-generated sites though. (Although I'm sure it's a difficult problem!)
How do you recall 2010 search? (I suspect I've lost it a bit - I'm 50.5 years old)
additionally ads were firmly separated into a colored box away from actual results
This is the same problem with something like WoW classic... you can get the game that existed 15 years ago. But even if it is the exact same game, the world itself isn't. Online walkthroughs, videos, modding knowledge, theory crafting, etc. Those things are much more fleshed out today so even if the system didn't change 1 bit, WoW Original vs WoW Classic are really two separate games.
Likewise... if you dropped Google Original down today? I'd love to see how fast it would get owned by these sorts of operations that have had a decade+ of practice in skills like CEO that didn't exist in 2010.
You had more relevant results? That wouldn't change because companies live and die off of SEO now and didn't then. Highlighted ads are such a small thing on the website when compared to getting a full front page of the same Stack Overflow answers in 20 different websites that all have SO cloned and reskinned.
