Those simple web 1.0 sites made by college professors are a gold-standard in my book. I always enjoy finding them in search results. Although they are becoming increasingly rare.
Paul's Notes remains the absolute best textbook Calculus and intro to DiffEQ! Not sure if it's been updated since 2005, but I mean, it's not like they're discovering new Calc II methods! Being that it's not a $200 textbook rehashing the same stuff as the last 10 editions, it's easily one of my favorite websites
Don't forget how Google will now drop search terms if it thinks you mean something else, or add unrelated synonyms to your search (presumably to "help" folks who aren't good at writing queries)
I heard that before and have trouble believing this is the cause at least for Internet recipes. Sure for a recipe book in 1950, but are recipe content farms going to sue each other? Isn't the lawyer costs way more than could be gained?
They're even better than black text on white backgrounds. They're unstyled and use your browser default styling. granted it's rare anyone configured those so it's almost always black on white.. but for people who do specify their own preferences it's really nice to have them respected and not rely on hacking in my own css or js to override theirs
I have a website that is just a few black text on white HTML files I maintain in whatever text editor I have at hand. Loads lightning fast, and if you cannot view it, its not a web browser. Last I checked, the total site size was about 60KB.
As time goes on, even the amount of text I am putting out get trimmed down. Make the words count, don't count the words.
Unfortunately, that's a trivial signal to emulate.
At a minimum, you'd have to validate them by confirming existence in the Wayback Machine.
Otherwise agreed that those are indeed high-signal documents. Increasing reliance on integrated educational software means that even such things as online syllabi are increasingly rare.
The type of sites GP is talking about are typically hosted on .edu servers, under faculty webhosting (often featuring a "/~profname/" in the url). That's a non-trivial signal.
Pages at extant domains might variously be available to undergraduate or graduate students, faculty, staff, and adjuncts. Those might either directly host emulative material or be convinced or compromised into hosting content.
If there's one thing that the Internet's history to date has proved, its that perverse incentives lead to perverse consequences.
