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