The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.
Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit
Even if you find the manufacturer's site it’s more likely than not broken, with a search feature that pulls up what it claims are results but empty divs instead of links, or busted jQuery code from 2013 that prevents anything from loading.
Is it a real but broken site? Is it just another click farm? Does it matter?
@eaton I find this bitterly ironic, in that a chunk of my working life (1991-2000) was spent in a business that was solely built on distributing service manuals, and one of the biggest fights I had with my dad was predicting that digital distribution would ultimately kill our business. We were turning over ~A$1M p/a when I quit in 2000.
I was, sadly, mostly correct (it's still running, barely, distributing rare manuals digitally).
Eaton
Ali