this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
370 points (97.2% liked)

Technology

59656 readers
2726 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
L3s@fry.gs
L4s@fry.gs
L4s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
370
The Toilet Theory of the Internet: Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster. (www.theatlantic.com)
submitted 6 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
46 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] li10@feddit.uk 131 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The results aren’t easy when they’re useless tho.

Particularly an issue when you’re googling an obscure software issue, you just get spammed with the same copy/paste “troubleshooting” steps. Which usually boil down to “reinstall this completely unrelated driver”.

[–] Lojcs@lemm.ee 33 points 6 months ago (1 children)

One of the biggest advantages of using Linux over windows is the lack of those endless seo sites while troubleshooting.

[–] RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 50 points 6 months ago (1 children)

oh, they're there and they're just as useless. I'm the kind of person who refuses to remember things so I have been using google search to take me to the particular website which contains that one liner which I know fixes my issue. For the past 4 years or so, I started actually remembering a lot of things because it's impossible to get to those pages through all the spam.

A search for a specific question used to take me to a stack overflow page with that specific wording to which the answer was the specific command and a description of what it does. Now not only does google ignore half the search terms, but the first 5 results are crap websites with a long description which seems to be close to what i'm looking for only to prove to be useless 3 minutes in.

[–] Anti_Iridium@lemmy.world 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I was once searching Native-American in quotes and was getting Indian Ocean as a result.

Edit: I was searching for statistics on electrification of the reservations during the 1960's. It may have been "Indian" with

-ocean

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

Gotta turn on "verbatim mode"

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 15 points 6 months ago

…along with everything else. After all, if you reinstall everything from scratch the problem will maybe go away or you get too tired to go on

[–] Cheskaz@lemmy.world 11 points 6 months ago

Particularly an issue when you’re googling an obscure software issue, you just get spammed with the same copy/paste “troubleshooting” steps. Which usually boil down to “reinstall this completely unrelated driver”.

Just reading this caused a small spike of ice cold fury within my soul