The measure of success of a search engine is how quickly I leave it with the info I want in hand.
I too find this a bit strange. Downranking results that would otherwise be naturally highly ranked seems only to inhibit the operation of the search engine.
Yes, people aren't going to use a search engine that politically skews the results. It will end up as a tiny website for a very narrow niche of person, similar to eg Mastodon.
> I find it rather concerning their vision of a better search involves deciding what is good and bad
the entire purpose of a search engine is to do this, you've been grossly confused about the entire space if you think this isn't exactly what everyone is trying to do.
Yes, but it usually isn't "good or bad" in the moral judgement sense. Not to mention the many logical flaws involved with trying to make such prioritization. If I'm searching for say desert eagles refusing to return any gun related content and only giving me birds isn't helping anything or anyone.
Although come to think of it I'm surprised that I haven't heard of any attempts of fundamentalists to make "moral" search engines that do things like exclude evolution.
> As we put more of our records and news on the Web and nowhere else, that’s *vitally important for historians and other people who appreciate knowing* who said what to whom and when.
Fortunately the Internet Archive crawler has already continued (confirmed by Jason Scott), the new information is just not yet represented in the Wayback Machine.
Considering the importance of events currently happening around the world (wars, elections, ...), that's very good. (although I'm not sure how extensive its coverage is)
However, all the archiving efforts by individuals using Save Page Now or the API are still halted.
Seems fair. You can't make it right for everyone, and at one point they need to draw a boundary, to care for your citizens and keep up the standards.
Otherwise everything would fall to the lowest common denominator.
I don't think it's fair for the article to say that a "temporary measure" has now become a permanent one, it likely is temporary until the problem is solved.
Sometimes I ask myself why the schedule of those always-late trains isn't changed. If it would be planned that it always arrives "15min later", people and other transportation could work with that timing so much better.
I haven't done it, but I want to.
A very important thing you should know is that only the most recent 5000 videos are kept in the history export, so my advice is to download it frequently.
What I've been doing is regularly getting the .json dumps takeout.google.com and merging them. (for around 4 years now)
I plan on eventually processing that data later to track usual statistics, but also for example my interests over the years (by grouping and then searching for common topics like Minecraft, Haskell, Covid, ...).
Thanks for the heads up! I thought that was the full amount of data.
My idea is to write a purely front-end application that takes a json file and uses a chart to visualize some interesting information by year, such as the most watched channels for the selected year
Understandable knowing Ecosias goals, but I find it rather concerning their vision of a better search involves deciding what is good and bad.
Ranking by quality (against spam & SEO sites) is fine, but it should be applied equally to all Websites, and not target specific companies.