this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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I can't remember the name, but when the internet was just starting and there were a lot of search engines with no dominate ones, there was an aggregator program that you could input many search engines into, then use it as the searching tool. It would query all the engines and combine, sort, rank, and remove duplicate finds.
Edit: more specific - It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you'd load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
The reason I mention it is because we're sort of back at that point. Google is failing, Bing never was great, and all the alternatives have their issues, usually with not having the same database to work with. So if you gathered all the best ones, the ones without ties to corporate or AI, then put their results together, maybe you'd have something like what Google was at its peak before "do no evil" got painted over.
Incidentally, Google became what it was/is because it gobbled up a lot of those early search engines' databases. I miss you, Hotbot. You were a good one.
Search used to be so good. I had an old Honda civic that suddenly wouldn't start. It wasn't the starter, alternator, or battery. I managed to find a forum post with my exact issue, which was that a small rubber piece on the clutch pressed a button to "tell" the starter it was okay to start. Twenty minutes later I had zip tied a piece of plastic into place and had a working car again.
If I tried to diagnose that same issue today, it'd be dozens of SEO garbage slop sites without any actual useful information.
They are literally walling off all this information that used to be easy to access and for the public. It’s our data that we the people decide to share with the world and these rent seeing corporations are hiding it away so they can start charging us "tokens" to access our own public information.
I was thinking the same thing recently. It's not the place it once was. But in general the internet has changed a lot. And it's not just AI.
Oh and now we're getting into age verification crap also yay
An example of number 4, there's a poster I've seen on reddit that's posting very relevant content, but then every post ends with "@xxxxxxxx on all socials". It just takes the whole thing from content I might want to engage with to the exact opposite.
I asked gpt5 and it told me to check the clutch safety switch. The thing you fixed.
Did it give a diagram and troubleshooting steps from the factory service manual too? This is all stuff you would typically find in forums. There's always some dealer tech around who can copy and paste from their service equpiment/library
5-10 years ago, you could be pretty sure this was a thing that actually needed checked, since the post about the clutch safety switch was posted by a real person who presumably had the same problem as you and fixed it with this method.
Now, there's no way to know if that's actually the case, or if "clutch safety switch" is just a likely string of words to feed someone who is having car trouble. You might get lucky, or you might get sent on eight consecutive goose chases because an LLM fundamentally doesn't know what factual knowledge is, it only knows how to reorder and regurgitate things that other people have said in other contexts.
I agree with the larger point you’re making, but chatbots are getting better at referencing posts / websites from which they’re taking a solution.
That’s if and only if of course they used a web search tool to answer, and if that website is still alive — made less likely due to AI.
But for debugging something like this, it is actually helpful for now with citations enabled.
The problem is that right now would be the peak of this information being available. What are you going to find in 20 years when everyone has abandoned forums in favor of asking ChatGPT for all the answers? There would be nothing left to train the models on.
I tried giving minimal information and still got similar results.
When I think about what got worse about the internet, it's mostly the life stories before recipes, the novel length pages to maybe answer a simple question, and pretty much anything else related to SEO.
Was it MetaCrawler? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
SearXNG is the spiritual successor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG
No, I don't see mention of it being an application but like Dogpile is a web-based collector.
I did a search myself, but (given how searching sucks now) couldn't find anything. Lots of hits for search engines themselves, but getting past that to other methods back then is difficult.
It was much like an FTP or torrent program but you'd load up what search engines to use and your search words, and it would actively pull the info then provide a single page with all results.
I thought it was Autonomy. You installed a program, instructed puppies agents, logged out, and while you were offline the puppies searched through several engines. Next time you logged in the findings waited for you. That was the time of 56k modems and metered connections.
I barely ever used it, but I'm assuming you are remembering gopher.
Not quite that old, more in the 2000 range based on when I had my PC that I used it on. This was a GUI app for Windows. Wish I had an idea, that was like... too long ago.
I think the old aggregator you were thinking of was dogpile.com
I know the name, but no, it was an actual program on the computer.
Hmm...interesting but I got no clue then