Memes

I don’t need a 27-page novel to know the temperature and time to cook something.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/

Keep your links, I'm going back to askjeeves

I worked very briefly for a company that was hirable to push websites for SEO. It was basically all young underpaid contractors and interns even the HR team except for upper management who was all the same people from their previous big company running telemarketing bullshit.

So yeah just want to add the usual suspects definitely had a hand in the enshitification of the search engine as you might think.

I used to do that to but then it started giving me info adjacent to what I was searching or a broader answer. Just got fed with that and the amount of sponsored search results.

Let's say I want to find an aftermarket built-in air jack kit for a car. Nevermind why, but let's say it's what I want to find.

So I look up car air lift jack. Google spits back a grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, a stack of videos of floor air bag jacks by people trying to sell them, Another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, then finally a couple of the kind that go on a car, and godammnit another grid of floor air bag jacks for sale, finally sponsored posts for floor jacks or the wrong kind, Amazon ads for the same thing, ads for brands of the floor jacks, and more, more, more, makers of the wrong thing, lowes, home depot, walmart...it's all wrong.

So the very next words out of your mouth are "Well, you used the wrong search term!" No, not really, but let's try getting rid of "bag", because that seems to be a big incorrect return on the search. So in goes "-bag" to the search term. What does that get us?

The exact same fucking thing. "-" is meaningless anymore.

So that's google now.

Want help with a tech problem?

Wade through a stack of a dozen shitty youtube videos 10 minutes long each (because google pays more for ad space, longer videos have more space, so those get pushed to the top, and a problem that would take a paragraph of text to solve now becomes a shitty video with blather, subscribe, previous videos, like, other videos, and 2 minutes of actual help), a bunch of sponsored links to tech makers that have shit to do with your problem, and SEO sites like solveyourtechproblem.com or wefixitgood.com or whatever BS name for sites that consist of boilerplate help like "did you turn it off and on again?" Maybe after all that you'll get an out of date reddit or github list of posts that don't have anything to do with your exact issue. So you put it in quotes, that should work, right?

"It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search" says google.

Why? I dunno. Not enough returns on the search to cram ads, sponsored links, shit for sale in?

Google is shit. I've switched to DDG. It has it's own frustrations, but at least I don't have to put up with Google cramming every ad and sponsored link in front of me along with garbage SEO sites. Google's heyday has ended.

I've been doing a lot of searches lately about running, picking shoes, overpronation, training schedules, etc.

Straight google searches (ones that would have returned worthwhile results even ten years ago) are all trying to sell me something, or are AI generated content filler garbage.

I have to add "reddit" to every search in order to get real information from normal people.

And YouTube is completely unusable without paying or adblock. Letting literal scams market on their platform

Just wanted to chime in and say that I am super happy with my Pixel 7 so far. Easily one of the best phones out there, especially considering the price.

A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.

I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.

Google anything related to 'laptop monitor turn off' and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search

Torrents, modded apk's,...

Check out my results for some chinese download service called "Content Plaza" for example:

Google:

Yandex:

Like, 2? On the 'entire' internet? 2? Right...

Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)

i test all web search engines the same way:

• punch in "Python itertools"
• see if the official Python.org documentation for itertools is the top result.

if it's not, then the search engine is contaminated with advertised or SEO optimized results and it's wasting my time

What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now? Independent blogs are as good as dead, and social networks are walled gardens, sometimes populated by self regurgitating robots.

It's ads all the way down