The fog of war and the small-net search engines

The more I browse the small net, the more I'm suffering from a lack of reliable search engines. We have several projects, which are aiming to build a search engine that could be the same as their big-net relatives. The truth is that they are not working too well. During the writing of this paragraph, I tried to search Gopher Lawn and Medusae Gemini Directory with them, and I failed. So the common result of current search engines is many entries in, what seems to be, random order. We are at the beginning of the path. It's worth saying that during gathering answers about how Gophersphere was in the 90s' one of the common answers was the problem with slow search engines!

When I am getting unsatisfactory results I start to think about a better form of a query string. Maybe that search engines are good, but it's some lack of my skill causing lots of random entries. But probably they don't, and it's caused by too simple algorithms of the search engines or limitation of indexed content (for eg. only titles).

We are like in the fog of war. I'm repeatably discovering the same addresses, which I am forgetting later. The most information on what is trendy now on the small net I obtain on recent Gemlogs' entries, and Blogrolls on various Capsules. On the one of the Gopherhole, I learned by accident that /taz.de/ (it's one of the biggest newspapers) offers its sites on the small net (Gopher and Gemini). How can such information be found less randomly?

I'm thinking how it was about the WWW years ago. The situation was probably the same. The first advanced algorithm was introduced in the Altavista search engine (1995-2013). The first version of the Google search engine was published in 1996. Of course the current situation of the world visible on the first pages of Google is sick, and the original PageRank algorithm now is distorted. It's supporting goals for which searching for an ordinary user isn't a priority (more collecting data and selling products based on that data).

I don't remember how "everything" on the WWW was settled down. I was then an active user, and this is a forgotten part of my Internet experience. How is it that the use of certain websites or services is obvious? So for searching, I am doing that pattern of activities. For checking the weather another one. For news the third one.

That knowledge of how to use the small net isn't set up for me yet.