I've used google since it was google.stanford.edu, and it's clear to me the results have suffered. My feeling is that two of the problems are SEO and feedback effects of google's own popularity.

SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first. And it works (sorta). Just consider crap sites like Experts Exchange that we've only learned about because they pollute many searches.

Feedback effect: Thanks to google, less people do less collecting of good links. Why bother when you can google for it? So there's less good information for google to use in ranking links. Bear in mind that when google started, nearly every home page had a long list of links to all the pages that particular user liked and frequently used. I used to have one; I've long since deleted it; my blog has some outgoing links that I like, but relatively few. If I twittered, I'd probably post a lot of outgoing links, but of dubious value; there's no gardening of just the perfect page of 100 links going on anymore.

(I think this also partially explains why some (generally more specialized, so less effected by other things) results feel dated -- legacy links that are still hanging around from days when links were still used that way.)

Feedback effect: Thanks to google, ten sites tend to be more important than any other sites on any given topic. This results in certain sites becoming increasingly important. Wikipedia is the chief example here. Why is there only one Wikipedia and not a dozen? Chiefly because it's gotten all the google juice. If you want your wiki article on foo to show up in google, you naturally write it on Wikipedia, not Fooipedia. The result here is that all google searches feel increasingly the same -- of course Wikipedia is always in the top ten, or maybe something like Stack Overflow for a technical search.

----

So, these days, if I don't see something interesting in the top ten, I often click on the link to page 10 (or 20, or 100) of the results. Often more interesting. For example, google for "mashed potatos".

Top 10 results: "Perfect mashed potatoes" (SEO), allrecipies.com (always in top 10 for any recipe search), foodnetwork.com, Wikipedia, about.com, nytimes, etc. Pictures of mashed potatos. All generic and useless.

Page ten results: Dairy-free mashed potatoes. _Potato_ free mashed potatos! Caramelized Onion Horseradish Red Mashed Potatoes! A poem about eating them. At least marginally more interesting and quirky. What I would have expected out of google circa 1997.

I sometimes wonder if the Valley culture doesn't socially construct some of the startup pathologies. For example, startups taking over your life: why does this happen? Is this because startups take over your life and nothing can be done about this? I am skeptical of this: I run a small business, the time demands are rather modest, and I live a life outside of work. I'm surely not uniquely in a position to do this.

Now, step back: who here wants to say any variant of "That isn't the same thing!", "That isn't possible!", or "You are insufficiently dedicated and will never be truly successful!" You see, that is why startups take over your life: because you expect them to take over your life, everyone you know and talk to and model your behavior on expects them to take over your life, and if they're not taking over your life you are told you are doing something wrong.

This is the weirdest thing. You're explaining my own software to me. (The editor is the part of Viaweb I wrote.) I'd forgotten there was a head-tags variable. But thanks to you I've finally been able to get rid of the annoying Yahoo favicon.

Incidentally, you don't have to override head-tags. You can just change the global value on the Variables page.

Sorry about the usability issues. It was pretty good for 1997.

Hi, jacquesm.

Huge props to you for taking this initiative, but are/were you aware of Archive Team and our process of backing up Geocities since April? We found ways around the bandwidth limit months ago, and will be mirroring/distributing the data as well. We own http://geociti.es, for example.

We're somewhere in the 1TB range of data, and we're still finding new stuff, by the way.

Here's how to get access to the head (took some googling and tinkering):

1) Put editor in advanced mode by clicking on red arrow on top right (you have to be in advanced mode to override a variable)

2) Click 'Variables' link (now it is possible to 'override' the missing Head-tags variable).

3) Override the 'Head-tags' variable by clicking the "Define New Variable" button (even though we want to override)

4) Now you can paste in a tag like this: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://enter-url-here-to-your-store/favicon.ico type="image/x-icon" />

I love yahoo store, but it has some serious usability issues right now ;)