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Created December 10, 2025 15:19
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LinkedIn Post - 2025-12-10 10:19
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the-internet-never-forgets-cute-myth-in-2025-the-web-has-a-goldfish-memory-yo.md

The internet never forgets? Cute myth. In 2025 the web has a goldfish memory. Your personal brand nukes anonymity, but try finding a 2014 video and you’ll feel like you’re digging in wet sand. 🧠

My AI research agent pulled the receipts, and the drift is a decade old. In 2010 Google shipped Caffeine, then a 2011 update that rewarded fresh results. Users clicked the new stuff more, so the machine learned a bad habit - serve what’s recent, bury what’s quiet.

Why it feels like everything old fell into a hole:

  • The index isn’t a library card catalog. Crawling costs money. Low demand and rarely updated pages get crawled less or dropped.
  • Links rot. Pew found big chunks of older references die. When links die, the signals that kept your page afloat die with them.
  • Platforms locked doors. In 2021 YouTube made pre-2017 unlisted videos private unless creators opted out. Poof - years of embeds vanish from search.
  • Product choices cut ladders. In 2024 Google killed the cache view. Now your fastest path to a snapshot is the Wayback Machine, which is great but not integrated.
  • UX tilts to chatter. Google’s hidden gems and a Reddit partnership mean fresh forum threads crowd out quiet evergreen pages.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s incentives. People want current answers, ad platforms want engagement, and publishers prune archives to look “healthy.” Meanwhile, older pages lose links and context. Result - history slides off page one.

Nuance check - old content still ranks when the query is precise and stable. If you know the exact title, the author, the filetype, you can still fish it out. But the default is now present-first, past-if-you-insist.

Practical playbook:

  • Use time filters plus operators like site:, inurl:, filetype:, and verbatim mode.
  • Try alternatives like Kagi or Brave when Google feels noisy.
  • Go straight to archives - Wayback, archive.today, Memento.
  • Save your own memory - archive key pages, keep PDFs, use RSS. 🗄️

My take: the front door of the web now points to what’s loud, not what’s lasting. Build your own archive or be at the mercy of vibes.

What’s the best thing you recovered from the web’s memory hole this year - and how did you find it?

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