In the late 90s and very early 00’s you could google yahoo song names and get a downloadable mp3 link as one of the first results.
Cause search engines simply showed websites that contained your search terms, without filtering and AI algorithms.
Yep, too much of search engines today is people pushing SEO crap to rise in rankings and the businesses “protecting” users by delisting tons of sites that Google/Yahoo or who-the-fuck-ever has decided are “bad.” The number of times legitimate sites get swept up in that bullshit is too damn high.
omg, speed, why has no one said ‘speed’ yet? An hour-long tv show was 350mb, and it took three days to download.
Agreed. I can now download a multi-terabyte file in a matter of minutes or even less.
Wow multi-terabyte in minutes! There are not many ISPs delivering 100Gbps and even fewer are delivering 1000Gbps.
Unless you live on top of a data center.
In the aughts, pirates bay felt like the library of Congress. If a single commenter on a B tier forum saw it in a guy’s basement in the mid 80’s there was a sure bet at least 3 people were seeding it and one of them had great upload. If it wasn’t there, you had a dozen different sites with their own dedicated fans posting everything you could ever want.
Now it’s maybe 6 sites, they all have the exact same listings, and the only things with seeds came out in the last year of two. It’s like seeing your local library after a fire.
Private trackers.
Cinemageddon, for example, has lots of seeds on almost any worthless shitty B-movie you can think of going back to the early days of film.
Source: 16 years on CG
I can never get a CG invite, personally, I’ve basically given up except for that offer in my bio to eternally curse your enemies for one (still standing btw).
Unfortunately they never do sign ups, open or interviewed, and even if they did interview I’m only on IPT, which nobody takes as proof lmao. I mostly use usenet these days unfortunately, but at least it does have it’s benefits, DrunkenSlug accts are easier to come by and it is faster, and they have many things, but unfortunately lack B movies and other stuff I’m really into, but at least there’s IPT, slsk, yt-dl and internetarchive for some of those.
It might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.
I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it’s fantastic.
Closing Time is no longer by Green Day