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 archive.org’s way back machine has saved my bacon for some real obscure stuff, - palm m500 thumb board drivers - but often just as fruitless 😭
The click farms are infuriating though.
I've had a Cisco NSLU2 that's been running nearly continuously since maybe 2008 (with a brief downtime for recapping a few years ago). The site from that era that explains how to bitbang a truly minimal linux into the flash still exists, but because it doesn't run adsense, Google doesn't care about it and it's impossible to find. And since the traffic to it is so low, neither do other engines (I've since archived a copy).
It truly feels like the 90's before Google or Alta Vista even existed.
Pretty soon people will start bookmarking anything obscure they find, then exporting their bookmarks to HTML and uploading it somewhere for ease of access, calling it their, "Home Page" or some such.
Sarcasm...I think.
Eaton
gadgetoid
Frances Larina