Making This Site More Useful to More People
Improvements began 3 years ago
We cannot make the assumption that people who read this site have read it for 20 years or even 10 or 1. Some might have been here for a month, some for a week, some for a day, some land here once (first time).
Making a search facility that we control (Google isn't search anymore, it's increasingly just a slop plagiarism engine) is a goal that predates the LLM craze/frenzy.
As a side perk, this helps other sites narrow down or extract old material:
Search engines (as a concept) are under attack; some "silicon bros" try not to convince us but to demand from us that we use slop and "ask questions" (for answers from their chatbots). Anything we can do to preserve neutral, useful search (chatbots are not neutral, therein lies their appeal to "bros") is a service to information, whereas slop plagiarism is a disservice to all humans (that "bros" try to control "at scale"). █
Image source: 2023 Calendar Vintage Bird