Considering that Google (search) still lists plenty of FTP results, many of which have been extremely useful to me, this seems like another move to bully the Internet into what Google wants it to be. Will it start removing those results, effectively censoring another huge chunk of the Internet? It's already hard enough to find older/more obscure information, and FTP sites are more likely to be in that category.
Also, I can't be the only one who's absolutely sick of hearing that bloody "security" argument again. Yes, everyone knows FTP is plaintext, and so is HTTP. But drivers, which I'd say are a significant part of FTP use, are almost always themselves signed anyway, and I don't think malware is widely distributed via FTP either (I'm curious why FTPS/SFTP doesn't see to be indexed, or why they didn't decide to add that to the browser instead --- or at least I've never come across a search result that links to one.)
There was a time when www was just a part of the Internet and we had www search and ftp search engines. The one I used to use was called "ftpsearch" and the only thing (besides the name) I remember is that it used to say "This server is located in Trondheim" on the front page. A quick web search turns out that it still seems to exist in some form [1]. Unfortunately it apparently doesn't really work anymore.
Maybe it's time to bring ftp search engines back.
I just hope this isn't like how Google basically killed off RSS when they killed off the best client that everyone was using (which I've still never heard a good reason why) which I believe played a role in the decline of everyone having a blog.
And yes I know there's some niche support still, just as FTP will live on.
I use RSS every day, I have 3 stops when I want to check on current events, my RSS Feeds, Reddit, and here...
Please share your favorite RSS client
Right now I am mainly using Feedly.
However I have been wanting to selfhost more so evaluating moving to either FreshRSS or TinyRSS,
Why using email? I switch between phones, OSs etc and it was a bitch to find decent clients for the self hosted options on each OS. I can generally get my email everywhere, via ActiveSync on my phone, WebUI, thunderbird etc. And since I host my mail, the data never leaves my network :) It works really well, though I do sometimes feel like RMS having web pages emailed to me lol