Darius KazemiIt is sad to me that in 2024 if I search "Moby-Dick by Herman Melville" (no quotes) on Google, the free Project Gutenberg ebook isn't even in the top ten results
We launched Google Ads in 2000 in an effort to make a lot of money. While the product has a loyal following among Senior Vice Presidents, over the years we've made enough money. So, on July 1, 2025 we will sunset Google Ads.
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Craig P@darius On DuckDuck it's beneath a stack of summaries aimed at middleschoolers cheating on their homework. ๐
Nit@Craigp @darius on Duck Duck Go it was the 5th result for me, pretty good.
Strange that you see a stack of summaries, wonder if thatโs location based? Iโve got the UK filter on. I also run Pi-hole + AdGuard in Safari.
Googleโs results in comparison are horrible for content and layout. PG is very far down the list.
Screenshots of both, down to the PG result, attached.
n00q"moby dick a thon" is still the correct top result. also the best way to read Moby Dick
@n00q I dunno I prefer my own method https://tinysubversions.com/game/utopia/
You took the bait!
@n00q lol thank you
Jessamyn@darius I was surprised it was as high as 12th (for my search anyhow) but I skip over video results as "Obviously not a book" (a librarian superpower in this day and age).
@jessamyn yeah it was right under the fold for me. Really glad they surfaced a $215,000 rare edition in the top 5, very useful
@darius I like to think one of the benefits of being a billionaire is you can tell Google just what search results you want and it listens. #LateStageCapitalism
Dan Hon
Ethan Marcotte@darius @jessamyn feels sadly relevant https://bsky.app/profile/xanindigo.bsky.social/post/3k2uzkf5en724
Indigo Rose ๐ (@xanindigo.bsky.social)
ME: So, you know what the quote marks mean? GOOGLE: Yes. ME: And you're going to search for all of these words? GOOGLE: Yes. ME: I don't want results on anything else. GOOGLE: Ok. ME: Good. What did you find? GOOGLE: lol i ignored all your words here's a fucking shower curtain lmao
Steven Hilton@darius Pointing to free content like that doesn't enhance shareholder value.
Rachel Greenham@darius @anildash these days for old books i tend to go first to Standard EBooks https://standardebooks.org (and yes, Moby Dick is there ๐ณ)
Luis Villa@StrangeNoises @darius @anildash yeah, the serious answer these days is go to Standard Ebooks first.
The unserious answer is that obviously the best way to read Moby Dick is http://clickhole.com/the-time-i-spent-on-a-commercial-whaling-ship-totally-c-1825124286/
@luis_in_brief @StrangeNoises @anildash they're great but they only offer epub-style formats which is usually not what I'm looking for! (However I fully agree they should be in the top results and it's a shame they aren't)
@darius @StrangeNoises @anildash Itโs interesting (and depressing) how Googleโs pivot from โwe prioritize the oldest and bestโ to โwe prioritize the newest and shiniestโ completely failed to spot some future web-treasures like Standard.
If I may ask, what is your use case these days for raw Gutenberg text?
@luis_in_brief remixing the text and/or doing a very quick Ctrl+f for a passage I remember
acb@darius Why bother with the old and busted original? Surely, in 2024, they can get their AI server farm to confabulate a shiny new Moby Dick for you wholesale.
๐๐ฒ@darius two ads, a wikipedia summary, a couple more sites and then Gutenberg. IDK why anyone still uses google search in this decade
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Moby-Dick+by+Herman+Melville&ia=web
Richard Eriksson@darius Iโm going to use my mid-2000s (the decade) SEO knowledge and do something about that!
David Schlaepfer@darius 4th hit via Kagi: https://kagi.com/search?q=moby+dick+by+herman+melville
Darwin Woodka@darius I learned the "before:" trick yesterday, If you search with "before:2020" for example it removes some of the SEO fuckery. Works if you're looking for more internet historical things and know roughly the date you're after.
Renรฉ Seindal (MOVED)@darius On Google after Wikipedia I get online booksellers, for the next thirty-forty results at least.
On ddg Gutenberg is in the top ten, after some different language Wikipedia entries.
Andy Linton ๐ฎ๐ช 
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@darius There's a nicely formatted version here derived from Project Gutenberg:
@artnacrea I'm not looking for that, thanks. I'm looking for a text file to load in my web browser and quickly search the text of Moby-Dick, which is what Gutenberg provides
@darius Fair enough but I'll note there's the source XHTML files at:
https://github.com/standardebooks/herman-melville_moby-dick/tree/master/src/epub/text
Bill Seitz@darius also irksome: the difficulty in finding non-ecom-site review-posts for a book. (I prefer blog posts or MSM reviews over stream-posts to GoodReads, Amazon, etc)
Duncan Lock@darius
https://kagi.com/search?q=Moby-Dick+by+Herman+Melville&r=gb&sh=NKDthgNg4aBf0LjlX4RLAA
It's at #3, after Wikipedia and Britannica, which seems reasonable.
๐ผ๐ฎ๐ป๐ช๐น๐ช๐ฝ๐ฑใใใโฎ(๐๐จ๐ฆ)@darius
this is all planned.
create corporate owned AI
train it on all available knowledge
then destroy the public knowledge to prevent competitors
advertise to all ppl to use AI, because it gives better results
have a networo effect, critical mass of AI user, to get exclusive access to all the new knowledge, to cement your position forever.
it is playing out in front of our eyes slowly, but also quite fast.
LR@darius mo' bi-dick