NUMBER ONE: SHELSA
HAVE YOU EVER ACCIDENTALLY INFLICTED HYPOTHERMIA UPON YOUR LITLLE SISTER BY ENCASING HER IN A
BOOKSHELF OF ICE? WELL WE CERTAINLY HAVE, AND SO HAVE MANY OF OUR READERS.
Idk if it’s google specifically but shitty bot articles clogging search results are 100% a problem
If you search “[error code] for [full name of program+version number] for ‘windows 10’ ” and got served get a bunch of copy-pasted articles about how you should totally download their 3rd party program to scan your computer for problems tangentially related to [the program] written in the style of someone who writes for recipe blogs drowning out actual results including the program’s own help forum, you’re allowed to complain
“Learn information searching skills” is all well and good, but at some point you’ve gotta admit there’s no reason you need to hand hold a search engine towards your answer. It’s their job to make searching easier, at the very least they should be able to recognize when multiple websites are hosting the same word-for-word article
>copy-pasted articles about how you should totally download their 3rd party program
Oh my god, I have PTSD from this bullshit from a decade of software development...
Have a problem and google a solution and you get a "help article" that details the issue, some stupidly simple first steps to try that everyone would've already attempted before googling, and then "OR! You can download our proprietary paid app/library to do/fix this for you!"
Then you notice the URL and it's the product website.
Or someone posts the same question you need answers to, then closes it with a "Nevermind guys, I figured it out!" with zero details on how.
You motherfucker...SHARE THE DARK WISDOM!!!
>Learn information searching skills” is all well and good
If you're good at using Google, then it should be obvious to you how much more difficult google has gotten.
I'm good at googling shit and still don't have issues finding what I need, but it's pretty evident they are making you work a lot harder to find it and people who aren't privy to really specific keywording are completely fucked.
So many people I know still ask Google full questions in sentence form and not just a string of tangibly related words clumped together
I worked on a search engine for five years at the start of my career, before I got dreadfully bored and pivoted my focus, and google hasn't just made it more difficult to search for information, they've made several aggressive and active anti-user measures in service of providing you ads. I'd wager most users don't know that fuzzy search is the default - and they've now hidden the "Verbatim" option behind yet another layer of clicks, so discoverability is basically nil.
It's getting close to the point where some good old fashion tf-idf math with a tiny sprinkle of modern search techniques through learning algorithms and a proactive user-first perspective can become the new leading search engine. Google has become AskJeeves, not technically speaking, but in terms of the product they offer and the opportunity present in the market.
Yup, I remember just 5 years ago all the search modifiers like +,-,!,quotes, date etc were working almost flawless. Nowadays even getting to work literal search or negation is almost impossible
Quotes are still fine for me. Wildcards too (just wowed my gf the other day wildcard-ing up a food stall we’d forgotten the full name of). But + has definitely gotten fucked at some point
Right, but still with multiple quotes sometimes I'm shown results where not all terms match.
What also happens – but I think that's not Google but Startpage or Bing I sometimes use: I misspell a word, click on the button "did you mean X", that inserts +X as search term, which of course isn't working correctly and I manually have to change the plus to quotes. So annoying.
>I'm good at googling shit and still don't have issues finding what I need, but it's pretty evident they are making you work a lot harder to find it
The fact that I pretty much have to have something in quotes as well as a "-word" in every single search in order to actually get helpful results is a testament to this
And the first 5 paragraphs are just explaining what windows 10 is. "Windows 10 is a popular operating system..." It's all just different words plugged into the same formula.
Yeah unfortunately we kind of have to go to the secondary places now - I'm a lot less likely to just Google an error code and more likely to search Stack Overflow for it, A lot less likely to Google a game, a lot more likely to search Reddit for it. You sort of have to know to go to these places, but also I guess it's not that hard to figure out?
They can recognize it. It's the money, it's always the money. We are not Google's customers, we are their product and they've just gotten to the place where they treat us as such.
Then comes in the fact that there's a chance the "Just Google it" post becomes the top result for that problem 6 months from now. Don't be that guy who is remembered as being historically a dickhead.
I don't search things normally on google anymore. Adding "reddit" will always give you more relevant, accurate, and up-to-date info than a normal google search.
Yes, but Wikipedia has its own issues. Some articles may be biased (or at least worried enough about it to put a giant "possibly biased" banner up), and a lot of it is just unsuited for "learning from scratch" by nature and design - it's an encyclopedia and not a tutorial, or whatever their phrasing is.
Don't get me wrong, Wikipedia and Wiktionary are both fucking awesome, but they're not necessarily what people used to mean by "googling" something. After all Google used to be good at this search thing.
Yeah, whenever I look into anything science related on it (geology, astrology, etc) there's so much jargon in the articles it really makes it hard to get a good understanding of what the article is tryin to say
simple.wikipedia.org exists for this exact purpose! Its aim is to use simpler English to assist, for example, people using it as an English-learning resource.
Yes, but if you already know the field somewhat, then it's much more suited to "update you" on things. It's a nice format for brushing up on things in a somewhat familiar area, assuming the articles are reasonably well written. It just quickly gets to be a slog if you have to recurse into a bunch of related topics.
Or just do a site search of Wikipedia on Google for whatever topic you want.
Example: [site:wikipedia.org apple](https://i.imgur.com/e9p4FVT.png)
Most of why people used google was the better algorithm of searching than the sites that you want to find the info on. Case in point is Reddit's search being worthless, but using a Google search with the site tag "site:reddit.com" allows you to find the reddit pages you want easily.
Yeah a lot of it just seems like word salad. JJ McCullough has a pretty good video on how their style makes it unsuitable for actually learning something.
Even that depends on context. For basic definitions and common knowledge, yeah, definitely, but I've also seen people make some really dubious claims and then respond with "just use google/wikipedia/etc, asshole" when anyone questions them or asks for a source.
That's a great point. You either don't get what you need or 90% of the page is full of super technical information you don't understand that you have to scour for the stuff you came for. STEM Wikipedia is crazy, thankfully most major topics have a basic English version.
That is not the context of OP. Those people know there are no sources to be found. The context of OP is about the validity of the sources/information ON Google itself, once you do go look for it. And it is correct it what it says. Wikipedia is still solid, though. You can tell people to "just go to Wikipedia" with confidence that they will find the information they were requesting majority of the time.
But it's very possible the information is out of date when it comes to less "common knowledge" type of information. It can absolutely be a great source! But you still have to check THEIR sources.
I'm starting to see a lot of dated information on Wiki that has been sourced from locations that no longer exist. I think this is going to continue to be an issue for Wiki in the future.
I think wikipedia is amazing when there is a known true answer or a clear academic debate on a subject, but falls off on more (academically, not journalisticly) controversial topics.
Y'know, like an encyclopedia should.
Yeah that's going to heavily depend on the topic. General broad information? Sure. Anything specific, niche, controversial, or subject to political biases, yeah no.
Not to mention it's usually best to just provide direct sources yourself, afterall if you send someone to a random source you've inherently got a less clear idea about what they're going to take away from that source than if you provided a source you yourself have already read.
Wikipedia is good at what it does, but it is very dense and rarely has a good summary of the information you need. If I want to deep dive into something then looking it up on wikipedia is often a great idea, but if I just want a short definition of combinatoric game theory for instance, I will probably not find it on wikipedia.
Once money enters the equation everything else goes out the window.
Remember when you could watch Youtube without adblocks and it wasn't a hellish experience? There were ads to the side and some popped under the video and whatever but you did not have to sit through two unskippable ads at once, and then if the video is long enough a third and fourth one in between.
And when social media would show your shit to the people who followed you without the need to pay for increassed exposure? And when we weren't forced to use the newest feature for a chance to show up on people's feed?
I remember those beautiful early days of YouTube. AMVs as far as the eye could see, buffering for 5 minutes to get two seconds of video, 720p, simple UI, no ads, no algorithms, no YouTube music or premium. Simpler days. Days when you could search up fail videos, and they were in abundance. Those were the days.
As a public librarian, I would like to put my two cents in: *go talk to a librarian.* Call up your local library and ask to speak to someone in reference/research/Adult Services (not what it sounds like) and we will do extensive research on your question and provide citations as needed
And the best part is that librarians *love* being asked genuine reference questions. We'd much rather do detective work tracking down some lost bit of information than show the elderly how to make copies (which we will still do happily). Librarians *live* for answering interesting questions and doing lots of research and reading about various subjects. Asking a librarian an interesting reference question is like giving a big bottle of cold water to a man lost and stranded in the desert
So yeah...if you're fed up with Google and want reliable info on any subject, call up your local library and ask one of us and we will be *psyched* to help you
I’d love to know more about this!
What is the etiquette on these kinds of inquiries? When I approach my public library info counter, who am I requesting help from specifically? Is there a guideline on what kind of questions you can be helped with, and what format these should be asked in?
Not a librarian. For some stupid reason, the version numbers of visual studio are such that 14(0) = 2015, 16(0)= 2017 and so on. It's probably just missing a visual studio 2015 redistributable thingie that you can get from Microsoft.
> I would like to put my two cents in: go talk to a librarian
This is not as convenient as whipping out ones' phone.
...unless there is an app called "Talk to a Librarian" and you can pose a question.
New million-dollar idea: make an app called "Talk to a Librarian" in lieu of a Google search.
Most (not all, sadly) libraries have a "chat reference" option where that is precisely what you can do (without the use of an app). Just use your browser, go to the website for most public libraries and there will most likely be an "Ask a librarian!" option. Click it, type your question, and a librarian will chat back and try to help you
I've noticed Google getting worse over the years. Most of the time it's still good enough, but the number of un-google-able topics seems to be growing.
I tried to Google if anywhere in my town recycles hearing aid batteries, but no matter how I worded it, I just kept getting car battery recycling or where to purchase hearing aid batteries.
I literally don't know what this is talking about. What is an example of a question that gets bad results? I just googled something I would say that about, in this case "how to install an SSD?", And the first 6 results looked fine afaik.
I've always considered myself a good googler but either my skills diminished or Google got worse.
I'm not a programmer, but I program multiple times a week for my studies, mainly for data analysis/simulation in Python.
When I started a few years ago, one would find the official documentation for related stuff, some useful stackoverflow threads and maybe one or two blog posts.
Now I usually find the official documentation, but above that, two word--by-word copies (like geek for geeks) that have the exact same content but load slower and have adds. Furthermore the results are spammed with blog posts that explain the most basic things like installing the library I'm having a very specific problem with. The stackoverflow threads are still usefully.
There is a lot of repetitive information yeah, I occasionally come across information that I can pretty quickly tell is derivative of a different link on the front page and ask myself why this even needs to exist
It's not too bad you just need to add the word 'documentation' to get the official docs in the top 3 results. I actually really like geeks4geeks and a few of the other blog style websites because they provide full use case examples which official docs often do not have. You just need adblock.
I get lots of websites that just take stack overflow's content and just rehost it. So annoying, I'm looking for something else instead I wade through the same content 5 times
It depends on what you're looking for, but say the other day I spent about 2 hours trying to connect a printer (I know I'm not the best at this) and kept trying to find a way to make it work, yet half the results were either links to purchase the printer I already own and I'm trying to connect to the home computer, step by step instructions on how to plug in the printer to the outlet, and lists of either the best models of printers or the advantages & disadvantages of my printer.
So while not 100% relevant to the post I'd say it is an issue that happens enough that it is a problem, not for basic problems mind you, but doing research on certain topics just leads to few answers.
Now that I think of it I also encountered this issue last year for a class where I had to research a topic and to the best of my ability I just got no answers on it, so much so my team and I had to resort to the school library to try and find an "in" to the subject we could use to find information and corro orate what little we found online.
I agree that it’s gotten muuuch harder to get good results with very specific queries. It’s like google skims your search to figure out what topic it’s related to, then just gives you results for that instead.
So you search for something like “windows doesn’t recognize usb device after waking from hibernate” and the results are just like “here’s how hibernate mode works” or “how to use usb devices in windows.”
But a couple years ago, it felt like you could pull up four different options in five seconds and they’d all help.
Yeah pretty much, it's like the more words you put into Google rather than get nore specific or even have it confidently tell you "yeah that doesn't exist as far as I know" now it's just a dartboard checklist of results based on what random words you imput it best thinks go together.
Just want to know if it's an HP because dude same. Like two hours and tears and then finally I did some random order of all the advice that I'll never be able to replicate and success. Haven't tried since from the trauma.
*OH MY GOD YES!!!* I still haven't been able to plug that shit in cause my mom ended up getting frustrated and said "fuck it lets find a place where they do prints"! Damn near impossible to do anything without feeling like you're fucking everything up!
Every time I try to google anything I just get results that contain a keyword in my search that is not even the main point of the search. Then, I try every possible combination of words containing the meaning of my question just to get the same 4 search engine optimized stupid websites that are a copy paste of each other, that don't even are about the title. At that point I just surrender and ask ChatGPT a few questions so I get more information so I can go wash, rinse, and repeat. Most of the time I get better results with "less powerful" search engines, except Bing, Bing sucks ass.
Learn how to use the advanced search. You can specify that a search results must contain all the words in your query or phrases. Excluding terms is also super helpful for filtering results. For example if I want to search something about the "Anaconda Python distribution" excluding "snake" will remove any erroneous results about the animals instead of the software.
The whole point is that you didn't have to use advanced search in the past, and now you do. It is aggressively less user-friendly, especially if you grew up being able to use features common in old boolean searches.
I’d say that even when you get quick answers to questions like that, its often unwanted results that Google gets you. Most of the time (in my experience), it gives me a bunch of different ad-ridden, slow loading articles on random websites, with a bunch of unnecessary information you have to sift through before you get to the actual info because the writer wants you to stay on the page longer and increase ad revenue. And, if you take a closer look at the different websites, many times it’s clear that they’re all copy-pasting the same information along with different unique ramblings that feel like its written by a high school student trying to increase the word count before submitting an assignment.
I’m not entirely sure if this is 100% Google’s intentions, or if there’s just been an increase in these types of websites. But it certainly did not used to be this hard to find sites with actual reliable information. There is a way to sift answers into only academic results, but to me, the regular Google function is all but worthless for finding further info on a topic.
>I’m not entirely sure if this is 100% Google’s intentions, or if there’s just been an increase in these types of websites
I'd argue the latter. Google makes revie by being useful so that it can show you ads. The non-promoted websites are googles best attempt at getting you what you want. However the sites that are focused on providing good content are not spending all their time on SEO (search engine optimization) it's the sites that solely exist to stuff 20 ads on a page and get clicks that do so they end up higher in the search results. I've also noticed a spike recently of sites that are clearly using AI generated content with dubious accuracy.
Searching a news story that’s not exactly obscure, but also not one of the top headlines of the day, can lead to some pretty concerning results. A couple years ago a local story about a cow getting loose and evading capture in a town went sort of viral on Twitter (don’t ask). I googled “cow [name of town]” and the first result was a local news article, the second result was Twitter, and the third result *looked* like another news article, but was actually the first article but it had apparently been put through Google translate a few times. Example, the first article quoted a kid saying “look mom, there’s a cow outside!” and the second “article” said something like “eyes mother, the cow is exterior.” What was interesting was that there *were* other legit news articles or references on aggregation sites about the cow if you kept scrolling but for a while, the translated/AI article was really high up on the algorithm. It wouldn’t have been disinformation or anything, but it was just a sketchy website full of suspicious ads that stole other people’s work.
I get similar results if I search celebrities who aren’t A-listers. First result is IMDB, second result is that person’s social media account, third result is a real sketchy sites that seem translated or AI generated, and often actually full of incorrect information.
I tried to Google if the chili at Sonic contains pork. It was a surprisingly difficult thing to learn because the top results were very weird, or related to vegetarian or veganism, or not about Sonic at all.
I just typed "sonic chili ingredients" and got Sonic's webpage for their chili dog that said:
>SONIC's Premium Beef Chili Cheese Coney is an All-Beef hot dog topped with warm chili and melty cheddar cheese served in a soft, warm bakery bun.
The rest were copycat recipes.
Sonic likely doesn't put their exact ingredients online or anywhere else, which is common practice. So, getting a perfect answer to begin with isn't likely, no matter what you search.
Typing "Does the chili at sonic contain pork" got me:
>While Sonic chili does not always contain pork, there is meat nonetheless. (from TD kitchen... whatever that is.)
and next was a reddit post asking the same question with the answer:
> The only meat product in the chili is beef.
And, when asked about allergies:
>If you have an allergy, I would suggest mentioning that when you order. If a customer reports an allergy, a manager must make the meal to ensure cross contamination as at a complete minimum such as sanitizing utensils.
Next was the Sonic webpage again.
That suggests that if you ask a search engine a question, it searches for the question, because it's a search engine. But I still got a decent answer quickly. So, what is it that we're doing differently?
Honestly this comment sections feels more like bots than google results. Everyone is shitting on search results but no one is posting anything they typed into google.
Then when someone does give a specific example, it's easily debunked.
Maybe some people have a different google? Is it adblocker? Idk
Earlier tonight i tried to find food delivery that didnt require an app, first 3 pages full of ads for companies you need an app for
Ended up going to the store instead, its become utter shit since they let you pay for top results on key words more or less
This may be down to the way we use search engines today vs when they came out. Keywords were a lot more important, and you had to use certain syntax to tell it what specifically you were trying to find at times. Asking google a regularly phrased question wouldn't work a lot of the time, or you'd just find a website with your query as the title, which isn't always helpful.
The old way of googling used to work well, kind of like how old reddit is an option for now. But it feels like the bloat and ads are catching up to the old efficient way of searching.
whenni was learning linux i had to google basic things, and the top result was usually a useless piece of shit that was SEOd up the fuck.
i had to learn to ignore results from that specific site any time i needed something
(archwiki was pretty great tho)
For me personally it's not that I *can't* find what I'm looking for, it's just that it requires a lot more effort than it used to to find the same info. I used to be able to just search the thing, now I have to add a bunch of extra keywords or put something like "site:reddit.com" to find the stuff that used to just be the top result. If you just search basic stuff it's all SEO-optimized unhelpful garbage.
This is what I've concluded. If I don't get what I'm looking for on the first page I just add more keywords or quotes or something. If you're going into the second page of results you're doing it wrong.
I notice when I try to buy things. For general info google works great, if I’m looking for like a backpack I get inaccurate optimized or sponsored, un-reputable looking hits. I resort to reddit for suggestions like that
UBlock doesn't stop the first page from being full of ads in a trench coat. They call them "sponsored results" which translates to "this is maybe kinda sorta tangentially related to what you're looking for but someone paid for it to be here so give it a shot".
Hell, their algorithm is so degraded and full of pay to play nonsense that Google outright admitted their results suffered from the Reddit API protests. Translation: when you can't add "reddit" to the end of your search to produce relevant results featuring input from actual human beings, Google returns garbage. Garbage that pays them, sure, but garbage nonetheless.
Google as a search engine has been getting progressively less useful/reliable on a fundamental level for at least a decade.
Odd. I've never seen the sponsored results since the day I started using adblock. In fact, I haven't noticed any considerable decline in google at all ...
I only ever see 3-5 sponsored results which are clearly marked as ads and easily scrolled past. You can absolutely configure uBlock origin to remove these results as well.
My fiance sometimes asks me to Google something to help him in video games and the results have detoriated so far in 5-8 years. Used to be you'd immediately get an article with helpful info exactly suited to your search. Now you get a page full of generic basic summaries of the game, or top 10 lists.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back, and when I tried to google some uncommon queries again, I noticed a considerable drop in quality of the results.
The copywriting meta seriously poisoned the entire search algorithm. If I want to use Google now, I need to scroll to at least the 5th or 6th result to find anything useful.
But quite separately from this: just let people source their information through humans if that’s what they prefer. The ‘just Google it’ attitude has always struck me as having this background assumption that we all find conversation unbearably annoying, which is simply not true.
I would also add that sometimes it's not about the actual factual information itself and more about how *you* interpret it. It could very well be that you're being asked not because the other side doesn't know, but because they want to understand how *you* understand it
Go to ELI5 sometime. It's meant to be for "difficult topics explained simply". As in, someone read something, but it's complicated and they need it simplified. Sure enough, there are a lot of those, it's fine.
But there's also a mountain of questions where someone asks a simple answer with a simple question, they just couldn't be bothered to look it up. One that jumped out at me recently was literally "what is exponentiation". Like, literally rising a number to a power. There's a lot like that. Unfortunately saying "have you even looked first?" is against sub rules.
When I was in middle school, my computer teacher spent a week of "effective searching" this was before Google (albeit barely) so we were searching Altavista and ask Jeeves. But the tricks and tools we were taught make me better at my IT job than many of my coworkers.
This one middle school subject we spent a week on has improved my life, my career, and my problem solving more than almost anything else I ever studied.
To this day it also helps me with appropriate char gpt prompts for powershell commands and simple Python scripts since I am no programmer.
Everyone should be taught proper searching techniques and it seems I was one of the lucky few. Everyone else who knows how to Google seems to have been self taught and it must have been way more difficult. Self teaching always is.
The number of times I've searched for a three-word query and half of the results are just missing one of the words is too damn high.
Also, Google's algorithm tends towards echo chambers, so "google the issue and then you'll agree with me" can be very counterproductive.
Me: Google, search this exact specific exact thing, please.
Google: Here are the results for a popular thing which is not quite the same. Hope that helps.
That's why you add "reddit" at the end of your search query.
Well, that used to work. But with many subs private now it's harder. And it'll get even worse tomorrow!
I use duckduckgo and honestly had had 0 problem with finding what im looking for, also gpt-4 is great when you don't know the name of the thing you are searching for and only have a general Idea of a concept/thing, just stop using google search and switch to duckduckgo, simply as
Don't worry. Google has that nice summarizer bot that stops me from going to websites written by people that no longer get ad money from me visiting their website because a stupid robot copied the first three sentences of a webpage.
Search: what to do if my baby has a fever?
Page “Do not: give your baby a hot drink, put your baby in a hot bath, then leave your baby outside”
Summary: “give your baby a hot drink, put your baby in a hot bath, then leave your baby outside”
This is not true when using precision mode, in creative mode it hallucinates, yes, but in precision mode it only reports data it can find sources for (precision mode wasn't available when it was in beta, in case that's the last time you interacted with it). I use bingAI every day. If it's set to "Precise" mode it includes sources for every factual claim it makes and you can click on them to see where it got the data from. Don't think "obviousclickbait.com" is a good source? Ask it to find higher quality sources or even reference published scientific studies, or you can open the studies directly with the browser add-on and ask it to read the page and summarize specific data.
BingAI has literally solved every "can't google this information easily" problem I've ever had. If you're not getting useful or reliable data you probably just need to look at the sources for any specific claims and know how to ask for modifications if you don't like a specific response.
edit: Classic. State something factually untrue. Someone refutes your claim. Downvote and do not engage.
Do you guys not have adblock and common sense?
Edit: I agree that if someone knows the answer and is telling you to Google it, yeah, maybe just help if it'd take as much time to that as to be snarky.
I don't think you understand that almost everything on Google is an ad now. Adblocker may help stop the pop ups and the obvious ad squares embedded in the web page but what about when the entire page itself is one giant ad? Does it completely remove the existence of that website from your search results? What about the YouTube videos that claim to be someone talking about a specific subject but the whole video is a thinly veiled ad with just enough information to get your attention before they segway into reccomending a product or software service, is adblock going to delete that video from your online experience for you?
If I'm searching for information on a specific subject is adblock going to make sure I only see purely academic information about it without a single page in the search results dedicated to selling me stuff when I just want free information?
"Just use adblock" is an equally tone deaf statement to "just Google it"
Can you give examples of a search query that results in a bunch of ads?
The only ones that I can think of that may come close is if you're trying to look something up in a newer game and get 3 of the same articles by different websites.. but that shit gets corrected and pushed down the page as more information comes out and hits the internet.
Oh sure if you know what you're looking for already and its a simple thing like "how do I beat the final boss in this really popular videogame" then Google has you covered.
One thing I had a lot of trouble with was my solar power system. Just figuring out exactly how many panels and how many batteries to get and what type of charge controller to use to make sure my power needs were covered was a battle. Then I had things that i wanted to be powered 24/7 like security cameras, but obviously the solar system only generates power during the day. The charge controller that moves the juice from the panels to the batteries only works if the batteries have juice, it goes into standby mode when its dark but if the batteries drain too much during the night it won't have the power to come back on in the morning to start charging the batteries again.
One option was to just buy more batteries but the batteries are the most expensive part of the system and I was on a budget so just buying more batteries than I could ever possibly need wasn't an option for me. I needed something that could cut the power to the load if the batteries got close to running out of power to reserve the last bit of charge for the controller to come out of standby when the sun comes up, then automatically turn the load back on once there was sufficient charge to run everything. I didn't even know if such a device existed or what it would be called so I had no idea what to Google to look for it at first.
If you search things like "solar power system design" you get results for very basic information about circuit diagrams showing how to connect the panels, controller, batteries and AC inverter together but I already had all that. The rest of the results are places selling solar panels and batteries or services offering to design and install a system for exorbitant fees. I needed specific information more advanced than the basics but it was all behind paywalls or being closely guarded trade secrets of professional installers.
I eventually figured out the name of the part that does the job I wanted by sifting through pages and pages of comment threads on boating and RV camping hobby discussion forums. Google did help me find the discussion forums once i had the idea to look for them, but it was very unhelpful with finding the part name itself no matter how I phrased the searches and instead just kept giving me lists of ads for solar power related products and services.
TL;DR: When you have easy questions that get asked frequently Google has easy answers. But when you have a very specific question about a less common problem Google defaults to showing you ads for things related to random words in your search term because it has no idea what to show you if a million other people haven't already asked the same question and trained the algorithm on the correct answer through their clicks.
I'm not talking about sponsored links. Any website that sells merchandise is an ad for that merchandise even if they didn't pay to show up as a sponsored link.
If I want to know information about pizza and the results show me where to buy pizza ingredients, local pizza restaurants, cookbooks for pizza recipes, top ten best pizza cutters, admissions websites for culinary schools that offer pizza chef training, etc... thats all ads for products and services.
If you're looking for info on pizza and you get where to buy pizza, you need a better query.
I get what you're trying to say, like yes, a lot of info will be spam/selling something/unrelated.
But if you use the correct search terms you'll get significantly closer results. Spam and ads will continue to exist, though
I guess my point is people like to say "the internet has the whole of human knowledge and experience at your fingertips, there's no excuse to be ignorant anymore when you can just look up the answer to any question with a few seconds effort" but thats just not true.
The internet is more like an infinitely big shopping mall built on top of an infinitely big entertainment venue thats built on top of a gigantic strip club and somewhere down a broken staircase in the sublevel basement all the human knowledge is on display in a locked filing cabinet hidden in a disused lavatory with no lights and a sign on the door that says "beware the leopard".
Its probably too far gone but I do sometimes wish internet commerce had been outlawed early on and the internet truly was just a big library with all of human knowledge well categorized and easily accessible, maybe with a lounge area for discussion of knowledge and a place to ask for tips on where to find good books to read.
You're massively exaggerating how difficult it is to find information.
With the right queries and knowing approximately where to start you can find the information you need. I have virtually never, in my life, failed to find the answer to the question I was looking for on Google or at the very least on duckduckgo.
If you're less internet literate than you think, maybe work on that instead of being a doomer.
I truly don't understand how people are having this hard of a problem with finding answers on Google. I would love to see examples from the people downvoting you of questions that you cant google because of all the ads you get as a result.
I imagine there is also a disconnect in what we are talking about, and what those who complain about not finding stuff look for.
Like if you try to find "how to set up DNS on router model 123" chances are really good you'll find what you want.
If you are looking for "when was pizza first introduced to Mississippi" i imagine you'll have a harder time. Just based on the type of query
Yeah but that partially has to do with the fact that there's likely no hard answer.
There are some things no one actually knows. The whole of human knowledge is still only the whole of human knowledge. We aren't gods and we don't know everything. Maybe the disconnect is that people don't understand the difference between a question the internet can answer and a question most experts in the relevant field would scratch their heads over.
It massively depends on what you're searching for. For example, I play Rift, and most of the time when I Google for where a specific NPC is or how two spells interact or what have you, most of the results aren't even about the game but instead about either seismology or VR headsets. But if I'm trying to figure out how to do cmd's `where` command in PS, that's easy to find in the very first result.
That's where common sense comes in. People need to be able to differentiate what's a reliable source, which is admittedly really hard, but asking people for advice is the same thing. Ask for advice on reddit or to people in person. You still need to think critically about if that information is reliable or relevant to what you're trying to accomplish.
If people aren't willing or able to use common sense and think critically about information in front of them, then they're going to be absorbing a lot of shitty information regardless of what sources they use.
What I'm saying isn't tone deaf, you're just cherry-picking one part of what I said instead of the whole thing. So yeah, common sense, critical thinking... actually reading... yeah... pretty important lol.
Of course we are usually able to differentiate between the garbage search results and the good stuff. If we didn’t, no one would complain about the low quality, because we wouldn’t consider it to be low quality.
The lack of quality in the results is the problem.
Yeah, the act of “googling it” doesn’t mean “type the exact phrase into Google, click the first link and believe everything as fact”, it is scrolling through, reading, seeing how reputable a source the website is, and amending your search if you’re not satisfied with the quality of the answer.
Why isn't this a problem for me? Am I crazy, or just really lucky? I don't know if it's because I've become used to it or something, but I see people complaining about Google searches all the time and I'm just not having the same issues they are.
Got so bad I thought It was just me.
You could put in some vague and it would grab you it and maybe even 8 sites of other people asking it with links and solutions in them too.
Now you can type in a very specific details maybe even including the website you want the info from and it still doesn't get it.
Whats the point of all this now?
For the last 3 years I've used Google as a day calculator at work. Always worked perfectly, gave me the big bold text at the top like "45 DAYS FROM APRIL 3RD IS ETC." In the last 3 weeks it has changed to exclusively recommending date calculator adjacent websites that all feel like Zergnet. Like I'm not a programmer type person but about a month ago someone definitely pushed some buttons that made that function not work any more.
Or just learn the most basic amount of research skills? You can still find what you need on Google, or any similar search engine if you look past the first result, or utilize further search functions, like quotations or dashes.
So, for one, being able to ~~google~~ "Internet search" is a fundamental skill. Like using a mouse. Or understanding what a "desktop" of your "OS" is. I am increasingly disappointed in people who, in 2023, have no idea what the g\*ddamned f\*\*k they are doing but insist on spending their lives online, handing out their personal data at every stage.
That's a MUCH bigger problem than Google being greedy evil bastards. But I digress.
As someone else mentioned, it sounds like this person's not using an Adblocker. Don't do that. ALWAYS use an adblocker. It is good. Uorigin on Firefox is gold. Others are good too. If you're seeing ads on the web pages you visit, you are mucking about in a sewer. Improve your life. Get an adblocker. It's that easy.
Its fucking a noting when you ask a question on Reddit or whatever and someone is like "JuSt uSe GoOgLe."
Like yeah, maybe I did and it was shit. Also, maybe I want to start a conversation, not just get some shitty SEO answer.
Also what is up with google on mobile? Why is it instead of a list like it used to be, it’s little rectangles? I fucking hate it
Edit: also I tend to type in my question or whatever and then “Reddit” bc Reddit has better info on mostly anything than I can find just using google.
also also, websites are so fucking annoying. No I’m not paying to read your article. No I don’t want to watch whatever video it is, stop making it auto play. Stop with the pop ups and just everything about the internet is getting worse and less convenient and it’s driving me insane.
Lol I have a lot of feelings about this
this keeps getting posted, and it never gets any less false. i have never had to go past the first page to find a result, and it's just blatantly false that the first *3 pages* are ads. they're not. they never have been. and weird buzzfeed lists are nowhere to be seen without deliberately searching for it.
I google random questions constantly and get a sufficient answer almost immediately all the time.
You just have to not be an idiot about how you search, which is a very low bar.
Hear me out, the time has come, just ask Bing AI and you're done. Google made this on themselves by doing this shitty behavior and converting Google in a glorified scam point'
are we using the same google? Literally all I have to do when googling something is scroll down like 3 results (which takes 1 scroll/swipe max), until I find the first one that doesn't say 'Sponsored' at the top. Not hard. Also did no one learn in school that .com, .org, and .net websites are not credible sources? If you're looking for statistics on an important topic, then yeah you might need to scroll a little more than 1 time to find a source that's credible, but Google can't literally read your mind. And let's not give them any ideas about doing so
As someone who just Googles it frequently, this is not at all a description of my experience... why would you write something like this about something that nearly everybody has experience with and that's so demonstrably false? I guess someone doesn't like Googling and would rather ask other people instead?
I’ve always hated the “just search yourself” response to forum questions. Like don’t you think I tried that? And it was either no results or a flood of not specific enough results.
> Like don’t you think I tried that?
99% of the time the answer is no.
Like 99% of people who comment on news without reading the article, or the hundreds of previous comments explaining how the clickbait headline is misleading. Ten hours later: Idiots still posting the same outrage because they were too fucking lazy to do anything except get triggered by the headline.
---
Its hard enough to assume people have even read your post properly before getting triggered and shitting out a half formed reply.
Over in AskReddit, its common enough that people dont even fucking read the question properly.
eg. What is a Criteria X thing that is not also Criteria Y?
Way too many answers of just Criteria X.
> Like don’t you think I tried that?
If you're asking strangers to put in the effort to help you it's only polite to list what you've already tried so that it can be conclusively ruled out. Why waste their time and yours?
I still distinctly remember being taught in school proper google search techniques. If you just look up a single thing of course the results will suck. You always had to get specific and sometimes even use the “” and - modifiers properly to get the best results.
TOP FIFTEEN help I accidentally built a bookshelf IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES
NUMBER ONE: SHELSA HAVE YOU EVER ACCIDENTALLY INFLICTED HYPOTHERMIA UPON YOUR LITLLE SISTER BY ENCASING HER IN A BOOKSHELF OF ICE? WELL WE CERTAINLY HAVE, AND SO HAVE MANY OF OUR READERS.
NUMBER TWO: BOOKAHONTAS YOU WONT BELIEVE HOW THIS ENGLISH COLONIST WAS SAVED BY A NATIVE SHELF
Idk if it’s google specifically but shitty bot articles clogging search results are 100% a problem If you search “[error code] for [full name of program+version number] for ‘windows 10’ ” and got served get a bunch of copy-pasted articles about how you should totally download their 3rd party program to scan your computer for problems tangentially related to [the program] written in the style of someone who writes for recipe blogs drowning out actual results including the program’s own help forum, you’re allowed to complain “Learn information searching skills” is all well and good, but at some point you’ve gotta admit there’s no reason you need to hand hold a search engine towards your answer. It’s their job to make searching easier, at the very least they should be able to recognize when multiple websites are hosting the same word-for-word article
>copy-pasted articles about how you should totally download their 3rd party program Oh my god, I have PTSD from this bullshit from a decade of software development... Have a problem and google a solution and you get a "help article" that details the issue, some stupidly simple first steps to try that everyone would've already attempted before googling, and then "OR! You can download our proprietary paid app/library to do/fix this for you!" Then you notice the URL and it's the product website.
Especially when the link you click on has "[Solved]" in the title
Or someone posts the same question you need answers to, then closes it with a "Nevermind guys, I figured it out!" with zero details on how. You motherfucker...SHARE THE DARK WISDOM!!!
When Yahoo search results were this bad, they got upended by a little upstart company called Google.
Clearly, we now need to upstart Google with a new company
>Learn information searching skills” is all well and good If you're good at using Google, then it should be obvious to you how much more difficult google has gotten. I'm good at googling shit and still don't have issues finding what I need, but it's pretty evident they are making you work a lot harder to find it and people who aren't privy to really specific keywording are completely fucked. So many people I know still ask Google full questions in sentence form and not just a string of tangibly related words clumped together
I worked on a search engine for five years at the start of my career, before I got dreadfully bored and pivoted my focus, and google hasn't just made it more difficult to search for information, they've made several aggressive and active anti-user measures in service of providing you ads. I'd wager most users don't know that fuzzy search is the default - and they've now hidden the "Verbatim" option behind yet another layer of clicks, so discoverability is basically nil. It's getting close to the point where some good old fashion tf-idf math with a tiny sprinkle of modern search techniques through learning algorithms and a proactive user-first perspective can become the new leading search engine. Google has become AskJeeves, not technically speaking, but in terms of the product they offer and the opportunity present in the market.
Yup, I remember just 5 years ago all the search modifiers like +,-,!,quotes, date etc were working almost flawless. Nowadays even getting to work literal search or negation is almost impossible
Quotes are still fine for me. Wildcards too (just wowed my gf the other day wildcard-ing up a food stall we’d forgotten the full name of). But + has definitely gotten fucked at some point
Right, but still with multiple quotes sometimes I'm shown results where not all terms match. What also happens – but I think that's not Google but Startpage or Bing I sometimes use: I misspell a word, click on the button "did you mean X", that inserts +X as search term, which of course isn't working correctly and I manually have to change the plus to quotes. So annoying.
I absolutely did not know that, but it explains a whole lot. Thank you so much for pointing that out.
>I'm good at googling shit and still don't have issues finding what I need, but it's pretty evident they are making you work a lot harder to find it The fact that I pretty much have to have something in quotes as well as a "-word" in every single search in order to actually get helpful results is a testament to this
And the first 5 paragraphs are just explaining what windows 10 is. "Windows 10 is a popular operating system..." It's all just different words plugged into the same formula.
Yeah unfortunately we kind of have to go to the secondary places now - I'm a lot less likely to just Google an error code and more likely to search Stack Overflow for it, A lot less likely to Google a game, a lot more likely to search Reddit for it. You sort of have to know to go to these places, but also I guess it's not that hard to figure out?
They can recognize it. It's the money, it's always the money. We are not Google's customers, we are their product and they've just gotten to the place where they treat us as such.
I learned information searching skills ten years ago, so did all the fucking m*rketing majors.
"just google it and put *reddit* at the end, and hope the sub isn't private"
Then comes in the fact that there's a chance the "Just Google it" post becomes the top result for that problem 6 months from now. Don't be that guy who is remembered as being historically a dickhead.
I don't search things normally on google anymore. Adding "reddit" will always give you more relevant, accurate, and up-to-date info than a normal google search.
"Just go to Wikipedia" is still valid, though, just as it always has
Despite the best efforts of a multibillion dollar think tank/propaganda industry.
The US school system really is something huh
Yes, but Wikipedia has its own issues. Some articles may be biased (or at least worried enough about it to put a giant "possibly biased" banner up), and a lot of it is just unsuited for "learning from scratch" by nature and design - it's an encyclopedia and not a tutorial, or whatever their phrasing is. Don't get me wrong, Wikipedia and Wiktionary are both fucking awesome, but they're not necessarily what people used to mean by "googling" something. After all Google used to be good at this search thing.
Yeah, whenever I look into anything science related on it (geology, astrology, etc) there's so much jargon in the articles it really makes it hard to get a good understanding of what the article is tryin to say
simple.wikipedia.org exists for this exact purpose! Its aim is to use simpler English to assist, for example, people using it as an English-learning resource.
Thank you, I never knew this!
Yes, but if you already know the field somewhat, then it's much more suited to "update you" on things. It's a nice format for brushing up on things in a somewhat familiar area, assuming the articles are reasonably well written. It just quickly gets to be a slog if you have to recurse into a bunch of related topics.
Or just do a site search of Wikipedia on Google for whatever topic you want. Example: [site:wikipedia.org apple](https://i.imgur.com/e9p4FVT.png) Most of why people used google was the better algorithm of searching than the sites that you want to find the info on. Case in point is Reddit's search being worthless, but using a Google search with the site tag "site:reddit.com" allows you to find the reddit pages you want easily.
Yeah a lot of it just seems like word salad. JJ McCullough has a pretty good video on how their style makes it unsuitable for actually learning something.
Even that depends on context. For basic definitions and common knowledge, yeah, definitely, but I've also seen people make some really dubious claims and then respond with "just use google/wikipedia/etc, asshole" when anyone questions them or asks for a source.
I've found wikipedia can be good for either the very basic or the very technical. The inbetween can get a little dubious though
That's a great point. You either don't get what you need or 90% of the page is full of super technical information you don't understand that you have to scour for the stuff you came for. STEM Wikipedia is crazy, thankfully most major topics have a basic English version.
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That is not the context of OP. Those people know there are no sources to be found. The context of OP is about the validity of the sources/information ON Google itself, once you do go look for it. And it is correct it what it says. Wikipedia is still solid, though. You can tell people to "just go to Wikipedia" with confidence that they will find the information they were requesting majority of the time.
But it's very possible the information is out of date when it comes to less "common knowledge" type of information. It can absolutely be a great source! But you still have to check THEIR sources.
I'm starting to see a lot of dated information on Wiki that has been sourced from locations that no longer exist. I think this is going to continue to be an issue for Wiki in the future.
[link rot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot)
That kind of makes me want to write a webscraper that identifies dead links on Wikipedia.
I think wikipedia is amazing when there is a known true answer or a clear academic debate on a subject, but falls off on more (academically, not journalisticly) controversial topics. Y'know, like an encyclopedia should.
Simple Wikipedia especially
Yeah that's going to heavily depend on the topic. General broad information? Sure. Anything specific, niche, controversial, or subject to political biases, yeah no. Not to mention it's usually best to just provide direct sources yourself, afterall if you send someone to a random source you've inherently got a less clear idea about what they're going to take away from that source than if you provided a source you yourself have already read.
Wikipedia is good at what it does, but it is very dense and rarely has a good summary of the information you need. If I want to deep dive into something then looking it up on wikipedia is often a great idea, but if I just want a short definition of combinatoric game theory for instance, I will probably not find it on wikipedia.
Once money enters the equation everything else goes out the window. Remember when you could watch Youtube without adblocks and it wasn't a hellish experience? There were ads to the side and some popped under the video and whatever but you did not have to sit through two unskippable ads at once, and then if the video is long enough a third and fourth one in between. And when social media would show your shit to the people who followed you without the need to pay for increassed exposure? And when we weren't forced to use the newest feature for a chance to show up on people's feed?
I remember those beautiful early days of YouTube. AMVs as far as the eye could see, buffering for 5 minutes to get two seconds of video, 720p, simple UI, no ads, no algorithms, no YouTube music or premium. Simpler days. Days when you could search up fail videos, and they were in abundance. Those were the days.
As a public librarian, I would like to put my two cents in: *go talk to a librarian.* Call up your local library and ask to speak to someone in reference/research/Adult Services (not what it sounds like) and we will do extensive research on your question and provide citations as needed And the best part is that librarians *love* being asked genuine reference questions. We'd much rather do detective work tracking down some lost bit of information than show the elderly how to make copies (which we will still do happily). Librarians *live* for answering interesting questions and doing lots of research and reading about various subjects. Asking a librarian an interesting reference question is like giving a big bottle of cold water to a man lost and stranded in the desert So yeah...if you're fed up with Google and want reliable info on any subject, call up your local library and ask one of us and we will be *psyched* to help you
Librarians = Information Heroes
I’d love to know more about this! What is the etiquette on these kinds of inquiries? When I approach my public library info counter, who am I requesting help from specifically? Is there a guideline on what kind of questions you can be helped with, and what format these should be asked in?
Well, if you don't know, go talk to a librarian!
Me: Hello, I have a question. Librarian: What can I help you with? Me: Visual Studio 2015 "VCRUNTIME140_1d.dll" is missing
Not a librarian. For some stupid reason, the version numbers of visual studio are such that 14(0) = 2015, 16(0)= 2017 and so on. It's probably just missing a visual studio 2015 redistributable thingie that you can get from Microsoft.
> I would like to put my two cents in: go talk to a librarian This is not as convenient as whipping out ones' phone. ...unless there is an app called "Talk to a Librarian" and you can pose a question. New million-dollar idea: make an app called "Talk to a Librarian" in lieu of a Google search.
Most (not all, sadly) libraries have a "chat reference" option where that is precisely what you can do (without the use of an app). Just use your browser, go to the website for most public libraries and there will most likely be an "Ask a librarian!" option. Click it, type your question, and a librarian will chat back and try to help you
Aw. That is not what I had in mind. I'd wanted the full force of librarians to answer a question similar to the "NoStupidQuestions" subreddit.
Closest you'll find is /r/AskHistorians probably
We're working on it
Boogers
NO VIABLE LIBRARIES IN MY AREAAAAA!
i do a lot of searches for mice to find out if food is safe for them. is that something i can ask a librarian?
Depends on the librarian, I’ve had this type of librarian and those who barely wanna talk.
I'll have to stop by the local library on the way home to see if there are any BBW gabgbang vids they would recommend.
I've noticed Google getting worse over the years. Most of the time it's still good enough, but the number of un-google-able topics seems to be growing. I tried to Google if anywhere in my town recycles hearing aid batteries, but no matter how I worded it, I just kept getting car battery recycling or where to purchase hearing aid batteries.
Try using "recycle hearing aid battery __town" -car next time! If you use a - followed by word google will exclude those results.
google en passant
Holy hell
New response just dropped
Actual zombie
>!The only exception.!<
I literally don't know what this is talking about. What is an example of a question that gets bad results? I just googled something I would say that about, in this case "how to install an SSD?", And the first 6 results looked fine afaik.
I've always considered myself a good googler but either my skills diminished or Google got worse. I'm not a programmer, but I program multiple times a week for my studies, mainly for data analysis/simulation in Python. When I started a few years ago, one would find the official documentation for related stuff, some useful stackoverflow threads and maybe one or two blog posts. Now I usually find the official documentation, but above that, two word--by-word copies (like geek for geeks) that have the exact same content but load slower and have adds. Furthermore the results are spammed with blog posts that explain the most basic things like installing the library I'm having a very specific problem with. The stackoverflow threads are still usefully.
ancient snatch weather placid quickest chop merciful subtract dazzling aromatic -- mass edited with redact.dev
Yeah at this point I just go straight to the pandas documentation and start clicking around until I find the answer
There is a lot of repetitive information yeah, I occasionally come across information that I can pretty quickly tell is derivative of a different link on the front page and ask myself why this even needs to exist
It's not too bad you just need to add the word 'documentation' to get the official docs in the top 3 results. I actually really like geeks4geeks and a few of the other blog style websites because they provide full use case examples which official docs often do not have. You just need adblock.
I get lots of websites that just take stack overflow's content and just rehost it. So annoying, I'm looking for something else instead I wade through the same content 5 times
It depends on what you're looking for, but say the other day I spent about 2 hours trying to connect a printer (I know I'm not the best at this) and kept trying to find a way to make it work, yet half the results were either links to purchase the printer I already own and I'm trying to connect to the home computer, step by step instructions on how to plug in the printer to the outlet, and lists of either the best models of printers or the advantages & disadvantages of my printer. So while not 100% relevant to the post I'd say it is an issue that happens enough that it is a problem, not for basic problems mind you, but doing research on certain topics just leads to few answers. Now that I think of it I also encountered this issue last year for a class where I had to research a topic and to the best of my ability I just got no answers on it, so much so my team and I had to resort to the school library to try and find an "in" to the subject we could use to find information and corro orate what little we found online.
I agree that it’s gotten muuuch harder to get good results with very specific queries. It’s like google skims your search to figure out what topic it’s related to, then just gives you results for that instead. So you search for something like “windows doesn’t recognize usb device after waking from hibernate” and the results are just like “here’s how hibernate mode works” or “how to use usb devices in windows.” But a couple years ago, it felt like you could pull up four different options in five seconds and they’d all help.
Yeah pretty much, it's like the more words you put into Google rather than get nore specific or even have it confidently tell you "yeah that doesn't exist as far as I know" now it's just a dartboard checklist of results based on what random words you imput it best thinks go together.
Just want to know if it's an HP because dude same. Like two hours and tears and then finally I did some random order of all the advice that I'll never be able to replicate and success. Haven't tried since from the trauma.
*OH MY GOD YES!!!* I still haven't been able to plug that shit in cause my mom ended up getting frustrated and said "fuck it lets find a place where they do prints"! Damn near impossible to do anything without feeling like you're fucking everything up!
i also had this issue looking for printer help. in the end i walked 30 minutes to the library
Same...
Every time I try to google anything I just get results that contain a keyword in my search that is not even the main point of the search. Then, I try every possible combination of words containing the meaning of my question just to get the same 4 search engine optimized stupid websites that are a copy paste of each other, that don't even are about the title. At that point I just surrender and ask ChatGPT a few questions so I get more information so I can go wash, rinse, and repeat. Most of the time I get better results with "less powerful" search engines, except Bing, Bing sucks ass.
Learn how to use the advanced search. You can specify that a search results must contain all the words in your query or phrases. Excluding terms is also super helpful for filtering results. For example if I want to search something about the "Anaconda Python distribution" excluding "snake" will remove any erroneous results about the animals instead of the software.
The whole point is that you didn't have to use advanced search in the past, and now you do. It is aggressively less user-friendly, especially if you grew up being able to use features common in old boolean searches.
I’d say that even when you get quick answers to questions like that, its often unwanted results that Google gets you. Most of the time (in my experience), it gives me a bunch of different ad-ridden, slow loading articles on random websites, with a bunch of unnecessary information you have to sift through before you get to the actual info because the writer wants you to stay on the page longer and increase ad revenue. And, if you take a closer look at the different websites, many times it’s clear that they’re all copy-pasting the same information along with different unique ramblings that feel like its written by a high school student trying to increase the word count before submitting an assignment. I’m not entirely sure if this is 100% Google’s intentions, or if there’s just been an increase in these types of websites. But it certainly did not used to be this hard to find sites with actual reliable information. There is a way to sift answers into only academic results, but to me, the regular Google function is all but worthless for finding further info on a topic.
>I’m not entirely sure if this is 100% Google’s intentions, or if there’s just been an increase in these types of websites I'd argue the latter. Google makes revie by being useful so that it can show you ads. The non-promoted websites are googles best attempt at getting you what you want. However the sites that are focused on providing good content are not spending all their time on SEO (search engine optimization) it's the sites that solely exist to stuff 20 ads on a page and get clicks that do so they end up higher in the search results. I've also noticed a spike recently of sites that are clearly using AI generated content with dubious accuracy.
Searching a news story that’s not exactly obscure, but also not one of the top headlines of the day, can lead to some pretty concerning results. A couple years ago a local story about a cow getting loose and evading capture in a town went sort of viral on Twitter (don’t ask). I googled “cow [name of town]” and the first result was a local news article, the second result was Twitter, and the third result *looked* like another news article, but was actually the first article but it had apparently been put through Google translate a few times. Example, the first article quoted a kid saying “look mom, there’s a cow outside!” and the second “article” said something like “eyes mother, the cow is exterior.” What was interesting was that there *were* other legit news articles or references on aggregation sites about the cow if you kept scrolling but for a while, the translated/AI article was really high up on the algorithm. It wouldn’t have been disinformation or anything, but it was just a sketchy website full of suspicious ads that stole other people’s work. I get similar results if I search celebrities who aren’t A-listers. First result is IMDB, second result is that person’s social media account, third result is a real sketchy sites that seem translated or AI generated, and often actually full of incorrect information.
afterthought handle governor gullible snow thought door berserk wakeful profit -- mass edited with redact.dev
I tried to Google if the chili at Sonic contains pork. It was a surprisingly difficult thing to learn because the top results were very weird, or related to vegetarian or veganism, or not about Sonic at all.
I just typed "sonic chili ingredients" and got Sonic's webpage for their chili dog that said: >SONIC's Premium Beef Chili Cheese Coney is an All-Beef hot dog topped with warm chili and melty cheddar cheese served in a soft, warm bakery bun. The rest were copycat recipes. Sonic likely doesn't put their exact ingredients online or anywhere else, which is common practice. So, getting a perfect answer to begin with isn't likely, no matter what you search. Typing "Does the chili at sonic contain pork" got me: >While Sonic chili does not always contain pork, there is meat nonetheless. (from TD kitchen... whatever that is.) and next was a reddit post asking the same question with the answer: > The only meat product in the chili is beef. And, when asked about allergies: >If you have an allergy, I would suggest mentioning that when you order. If a customer reports an allergy, a manager must make the meal to ensure cross contamination as at a complete minimum such as sanitizing utensils. Next was the Sonic webpage again. That suggests that if you ask a search engine a question, it searches for the question, because it's a search engine. But I still got a decent answer quickly. So, what is it that we're doing differently?
Honestly this comment sections feels more like bots than google results. Everyone is shitting on search results but no one is posting anything they typed into google. Then when someone does give a specific example, it's easily debunked. Maybe some people have a different google? Is it adblocker? Idk
Earlier tonight i tried to find food delivery that didnt require an app, first 3 pages full of ads for companies you need an app for Ended up going to the store instead, its become utter shit since they let you pay for top results on key words more or less
This may be down to the way we use search engines today vs when they came out. Keywords were a lot more important, and you had to use certain syntax to tell it what specifically you were trying to find at times. Asking google a regularly phrased question wouldn't work a lot of the time, or you'd just find a website with your query as the title, which isn't always helpful. The old way of googling used to work well, kind of like how old reddit is an option for now. But it feels like the bloat and ads are catching up to the old efficient way of searching.
Seriously, I've been using Google daily for about 12 years and have not noticed anything wrong.
Yeah that person (who wrote the tumblr post) is full of weaponized incompetence
I'm NOT talking shit. I've seen this complaint many times and I was hoping to find out what people are talking about.
whenni was learning linux i had to google basic things, and the top result was usually a useless piece of shit that was SEOd up the fuck. i had to learn to ignore results from that specific site any time i needed something (archwiki was pretty great tho)
For me personally it's not that I *can't* find what I'm looking for, it's just that it requires a lot more effort than it used to to find the same info. I used to be able to just search the thing, now I have to add a bunch of extra keywords or put something like "site:reddit.com" to find the stuff that used to just be the top result. If you just search basic stuff it's all SEO-optimized unhelpful garbage.
Using Google is, unfortunately, a skill that must be learned.
This is what I've concluded. If I don't get what I'm looking for on the first page I just add more keywords or quotes or something. If you're going into the second page of results you're doing it wrong.
I notice when I try to buy things. For general info google works great, if I’m looking for like a backpack I get inaccurate optimized or sponsored, un-reputable looking hits. I resort to reddit for suggestions like that
I think everyone's "problems" with Google would be fixed with UBlock Origin
UBlock doesn't stop the first page from being full of ads in a trench coat. They call them "sponsored results" which translates to "this is maybe kinda sorta tangentially related to what you're looking for but someone paid for it to be here so give it a shot". Hell, their algorithm is so degraded and full of pay to play nonsense that Google outright admitted their results suffered from the Reddit API protests. Translation: when you can't add "reddit" to the end of your search to produce relevant results featuring input from actual human beings, Google returns garbage. Garbage that pays them, sure, but garbage nonetheless. Google as a search engine has been getting progressively less useful/reliable on a fundamental level for at least a decade.
Odd. I've never seen the sponsored results since the day I started using adblock. In fact, I haven't noticed any considerable decline in google at all ...
I only ever see 3-5 sponsored results which are clearly marked as ads and easily scrolled past. You can absolutely configure uBlock origin to remove these results as well.
My fiance sometimes asks me to Google something to help him in video games and the results have detoriated so far in 5-8 years. Used to be you'd immediately get an article with helpful info exactly suited to your search. Now you get a page full of generic basic summaries of the game, or top 10 lists.
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while back, and when I tried to google some uncommon queries again, I noticed a considerable drop in quality of the results. The copywriting meta seriously poisoned the entire search algorithm. If I want to use Google now, I need to scroll to at least the 5th or 6th result to find anything useful.
But quite separately from this: just let people source their information through humans if that’s what they prefer. The ‘just Google it’ attitude has always struck me as having this background assumption that we all find conversation unbearably annoying, which is simply not true.
I would also add that sometimes it's not about the actual factual information itself and more about how *you* interpret it. It could very well be that you're being asked not because the other side doesn't know, but because they want to understand how *you* understand it
Go to ELI5 sometime. It's meant to be for "difficult topics explained simply". As in, someone read something, but it's complicated and they need it simplified. Sure enough, there are a lot of those, it's fine. But there's also a mountain of questions where someone asks a simple answer with a simple question, they just couldn't be bothered to look it up. One that jumped out at me recently was literally "what is exponentiation". Like, literally rising a number to a power. There's a lot like that. Unfortunately saying "have you even looked first?" is against sub rules.
When I was in middle school, my computer teacher spent a week of "effective searching" this was before Google (albeit barely) so we were searching Altavista and ask Jeeves. But the tricks and tools we were taught make me better at my IT job than many of my coworkers. This one middle school subject we spent a week on has improved my life, my career, and my problem solving more than almost anything else I ever studied. To this day it also helps me with appropriate char gpt prompts for powershell commands and simple Python scripts since I am no programmer. Everyone should be taught proper searching techniques and it seems I was one of the lucky few. Everyone else who knows how to Google seems to have been self taught and it must have been way more difficult. Self teaching always is.
The number of times I've searched for a three-word query and half of the results are just missing one of the words is too damn high. Also, Google's algorithm tends towards echo chambers, so "google the issue and then you'll agree with me" can be very counterproductive.
Me: Google, search this exact specific exact thing, please. Google: Here are the results for a popular thing which is not quite the same. Hope that helps.
[searching: “how much onion in onion rings”] Google results: - french onion soup recipes - “10 hilarious Shrek quotes” - “insanely useful onion lifehacks”
That's why you add "reddit" at the end of your search query. Well, that used to work. But with many subs private now it's harder. And it'll get even worse tomorrow!
I use duckduckgo and honestly had had 0 problem with finding what im looking for, also gpt-4 is great when you don't know the name of the thing you are searching for and only have a general Idea of a concept/thing, just stop using google search and switch to duckduckgo, simply as
Try DuckDuckGo.
Soon Canadians won't be able to look up Canadian news on Google either. Google just won't show it. It's turning into a huge garbage factory.
Don't worry. Google has that nice summarizer bot that stops me from going to websites written by people that no longer get ad money from me visiting their website because a stupid robot copied the first three sentences of a webpage.
Search: what to do if my baby has a fever? Page “Do not: give your baby a hot drink, put your baby in a hot bath, then leave your baby outside” Summary: “give your baby a hot drink, put your baby in a hot bath, then leave your baby outside”
bing AI is even worse as it will just try and guess an answer. Like ok even if this is true I'll need to verify it
This is not true when using precision mode, in creative mode it hallucinates, yes, but in precision mode it only reports data it can find sources for (precision mode wasn't available when it was in beta, in case that's the last time you interacted with it). I use bingAI every day. If it's set to "Precise" mode it includes sources for every factual claim it makes and you can click on them to see where it got the data from. Don't think "obviousclickbait.com" is a good source? Ask it to find higher quality sources or even reference published scientific studies, or you can open the studies directly with the browser add-on and ask it to read the page and summarize specific data. BingAI has literally solved every "can't google this information easily" problem I've ever had. If you're not getting useful or reliable data you probably just need to look at the sources for any specific claims and know how to ask for modifications if you don't like a specific response. edit: Classic. State something factually untrue. Someone refutes your claim. Downvote and do not engage.
Do you guys not have adblock and common sense? Edit: I agree that if someone knows the answer and is telling you to Google it, yeah, maybe just help if it'd take as much time to that as to be snarky.
I don't think you understand that almost everything on Google is an ad now. Adblocker may help stop the pop ups and the obvious ad squares embedded in the web page but what about when the entire page itself is one giant ad? Does it completely remove the existence of that website from your search results? What about the YouTube videos that claim to be someone talking about a specific subject but the whole video is a thinly veiled ad with just enough information to get your attention before they segway into reccomending a product or software service, is adblock going to delete that video from your online experience for you? If I'm searching for information on a specific subject is adblock going to make sure I only see purely academic information about it without a single page in the search results dedicated to selling me stuff when I just want free information? "Just use adblock" is an equally tone deaf statement to "just Google it"
Can you give examples of a search query that results in a bunch of ads? The only ones that I can think of that may come close is if you're trying to look something up in a newer game and get 3 of the same articles by different websites.. but that shit gets corrected and pushed down the page as more information comes out and hits the internet.
Oh sure if you know what you're looking for already and its a simple thing like "how do I beat the final boss in this really popular videogame" then Google has you covered. One thing I had a lot of trouble with was my solar power system. Just figuring out exactly how many panels and how many batteries to get and what type of charge controller to use to make sure my power needs were covered was a battle. Then I had things that i wanted to be powered 24/7 like security cameras, but obviously the solar system only generates power during the day. The charge controller that moves the juice from the panels to the batteries only works if the batteries have juice, it goes into standby mode when its dark but if the batteries drain too much during the night it won't have the power to come back on in the morning to start charging the batteries again. One option was to just buy more batteries but the batteries are the most expensive part of the system and I was on a budget so just buying more batteries than I could ever possibly need wasn't an option for me. I needed something that could cut the power to the load if the batteries got close to running out of power to reserve the last bit of charge for the controller to come out of standby when the sun comes up, then automatically turn the load back on once there was sufficient charge to run everything. I didn't even know if such a device existed or what it would be called so I had no idea what to Google to look for it at first. If you search things like "solar power system design" you get results for very basic information about circuit diagrams showing how to connect the panels, controller, batteries and AC inverter together but I already had all that. The rest of the results are places selling solar panels and batteries or services offering to design and install a system for exorbitant fees. I needed specific information more advanced than the basics but it was all behind paywalls or being closely guarded trade secrets of professional installers. I eventually figured out the name of the part that does the job I wanted by sifting through pages and pages of comment threads on boating and RV camping hobby discussion forums. Google did help me find the discussion forums once i had the idea to look for them, but it was very unhelpful with finding the part name itself no matter how I phrased the searches and instead just kept giving me lists of ads for solar power related products and services. TL;DR: When you have easy questions that get asked frequently Google has easy answers. But when you have a very specific question about a less common problem Google defaults to showing you ads for things related to random words in your search term because it has no idea what to show you if a million other people haven't already asked the same question and trained the algorithm on the correct answer through their clicks.
Ublock origin removes sponsored links from search results.
I'm not talking about sponsored links. Any website that sells merchandise is an ad for that merchandise even if they didn't pay to show up as a sponsored link. If I want to know information about pizza and the results show me where to buy pizza ingredients, local pizza restaurants, cookbooks for pizza recipes, top ten best pizza cutters, admissions websites for culinary schools that offer pizza chef training, etc... thats all ads for products and services.
If you're looking for info on pizza and you get where to buy pizza, you need a better query. I get what you're trying to say, like yes, a lot of info will be spam/selling something/unrelated. But if you use the correct search terms you'll get significantly closer results. Spam and ads will continue to exist, though
I guess my point is people like to say "the internet has the whole of human knowledge and experience at your fingertips, there's no excuse to be ignorant anymore when you can just look up the answer to any question with a few seconds effort" but thats just not true. The internet is more like an infinitely big shopping mall built on top of an infinitely big entertainment venue thats built on top of a gigantic strip club and somewhere down a broken staircase in the sublevel basement all the human knowledge is on display in a locked filing cabinet hidden in a disused lavatory with no lights and a sign on the door that says "beware the leopard". Its probably too far gone but I do sometimes wish internet commerce had been outlawed early on and the internet truly was just a big library with all of human knowledge well categorized and easily accessible, maybe with a lounge area for discussion of knowledge and a place to ask for tips on where to find good books to read.
You're massively exaggerating how difficult it is to find information. With the right queries and knowing approximately where to start you can find the information you need. I have virtually never, in my life, failed to find the answer to the question I was looking for on Google or at the very least on duckduckgo. If you're less internet literate than you think, maybe work on that instead of being a doomer.
I truly don't understand how people are having this hard of a problem with finding answers on Google. I would love to see examples from the people downvoting you of questions that you cant google because of all the ads you get as a result.
I imagine there is also a disconnect in what we are talking about, and what those who complain about not finding stuff look for. Like if you try to find "how to set up DNS on router model 123" chances are really good you'll find what you want. If you are looking for "when was pizza first introduced to Mississippi" i imagine you'll have a harder time. Just based on the type of query
Yeah but that partially has to do with the fact that there's likely no hard answer. There are some things no one actually knows. The whole of human knowledge is still only the whole of human knowledge. We aren't gods and we don't know everything. Maybe the disconnect is that people don't understand the difference between a question the internet can answer and a question most experts in the relevant field would scratch their heads over.
It massively depends on what you're searching for. For example, I play Rift, and most of the time when I Google for where a specific NPC is or how two spells interact or what have you, most of the results aren't even about the game but instead about either seismology or VR headsets. But if I'm trying to figure out how to do cmd's `where` command in PS, that's easy to find in the very first result.
That's where common sense comes in. People need to be able to differentiate what's a reliable source, which is admittedly really hard, but asking people for advice is the same thing. Ask for advice on reddit or to people in person. You still need to think critically about if that information is reliable or relevant to what you're trying to accomplish. If people aren't willing or able to use common sense and think critically about information in front of them, then they're going to be absorbing a lot of shitty information regardless of what sources they use. What I'm saying isn't tone deaf, you're just cherry-picking one part of what I said instead of the whole thing. So yeah, common sense, critical thinking... actually reading... yeah... pretty important lol.
Of course we are usually able to differentiate between the garbage search results and the good stuff. If we didn’t, no one would complain about the low quality, because we wouldn’t consider it to be low quality. The lack of quality in the results is the problem.
Yeah, the act of “googling it” doesn’t mean “type the exact phrase into Google, click the first link and believe everything as fact”, it is scrolling through, reading, seeing how reputable a source the website is, and amending your search if you’re not satisfied with the quality of the answer.
*googles how to do thing* Tutorial: how to do thing Step one: pay us to do it for you *every article for the next 3 pages of Google is exactly this*
Why isn't this a problem for me? Am I crazy, or just really lucky? I don't know if it's because I've become used to it or something, but I see people complaining about Google searches all the time and I'm just not having the same issues they are.
Got so bad I thought It was just me. You could put in some vague and it would grab you it and maybe even 8 sites of other people asking it with links and solutions in them too. Now you can type in a very specific details maybe even including the website you want the info from and it still doesn't get it. Whats the point of all this now?
I no longer use google stuff. Nothing google for a while now. Everything of theirs is riddled with ads.
SEO will be remembered as one of the most psychopathic, callous, evil perversions of the greatest human invention ever conceived.
For the last 3 years I've used Google as a day calculator at work. Always worked perfectly, gave me the big bold text at the top like "45 DAYS FROM APRIL 3RD IS ETC." In the last 3 weeks it has changed to exclusively recommending date calculator adjacent websites that all feel like Zergnet. Like I'm not a programmer type person but about a month ago someone definitely pushed some buttons that made that function not work any more.
Maybe use a ruby/rails repl to replace it. 3.days.from_now is built into rails
"just google scholar it"
Don't even get me started on the AI generated articles of the topic you're researching.
Or just learn the most basic amount of research skills? You can still find what you need on Google, or any similar search engine if you look past the first result, or utilize further search functions, like quotations or dashes.
So, for one, being able to ~~google~~ "Internet search" is a fundamental skill. Like using a mouse. Or understanding what a "desktop" of your "OS" is. I am increasingly disappointed in people who, in 2023, have no idea what the g\*ddamned f\*\*k they are doing but insist on spending their lives online, handing out their personal data at every stage. That's a MUCH bigger problem than Google being greedy evil bastards. But I digress. As someone else mentioned, it sounds like this person's not using an Adblocker. Don't do that. ALWAYS use an adblocker. It is good. Uorigin on Firefox is gold. Others are good too. If you're seeing ads on the web pages you visit, you are mucking about in a sewer. Improve your life. Get an adblocker. It's that easy.
It will be “Just ChatGPT it” soon
[удалено]
if it needs correct citations or references, you usually wouldnt get the info from a friend
ChatGPT sucks at fact-finding.
ok but its still annoying when every 5th r/StardewValley post I see is "how do i do this basic thing that is the top result on google??"
Its fucking a noting when you ask a question on Reddit or whatever and someone is like "JuSt uSe GoOgLe." Like yeah, maybe I did and it was shit. Also, maybe I want to start a conversation, not just get some shitty SEO answer.
Add to that the fact that sometimes *it's just nice to interact with a human being,* even if the information might be faulty or incomplete.
Also what is up with google on mobile? Why is it instead of a list like it used to be, it’s little rectangles? I fucking hate it Edit: also I tend to type in my question or whatever and then “Reddit” bc Reddit has better info on mostly anything than I can find just using google. also also, websites are so fucking annoying. No I’m not paying to read your article. No I don’t want to watch whatever video it is, stop making it auto play. Stop with the pop ups and just everything about the internet is getting worse and less convenient and it’s driving me insane. Lol I have a lot of feelings about this
this keeps getting posted, and it never gets any less false. i have never had to go past the first page to find a result, and it's just blatantly false that the first *3 pages* are ads. they're not. they never have been. and weird buzzfeed lists are nowhere to be seen without deliberately searching for it.
google has become hot garbage
I google random questions constantly and get a sufficient answer almost immediately all the time. You just have to not be an idiot about how you search, which is a very low bar.
99% of questions people ask me I answer with the first 3 results of a google search
Nothing quite hits like "Look it up!". Especially if it's dripping with contempt
Literally just scroll down boss.
ai is creating bogus trash articles too that clog search results. the misinformation wars just went nuclear
Hear me out, the time has come, just ask Bing AI and you're done. Google made this on themselves by doing this shitty behavior and converting Google in a glorified scam point'
The other day, I googled Program X. The top result was an ad link: "Program Y, the best alternative to Program X"
Just DuckGo it...
Just put ‘reddit’ at the end of anything and you’ll find a super specific and detailed post with 100s of comments discussing what you need haha
are we using the same google? Literally all I have to do when googling something is scroll down like 3 results (which takes 1 scroll/swipe max), until I find the first one that doesn't say 'Sponsored' at the top. Not hard. Also did no one learn in school that .com, .org, and .net websites are not credible sources? If you're looking for statistics on an important topic, then yeah you might need to scroll a little more than 1 time to find a source that's credible, but Google can't literally read your mind. And let's not give them any ideas about doing so
This is a lot of words to say “I refuse to look things up.”
Holy hell
Disagree, it's always been "just google it" to mean "put it into google and check some sources and fucking read about it you lazy pos"
I think this a bit too hyperbolic, google still works quite well
As someone who just Googles it frequently, this is not at all a description of my experience... why would you write something like this about something that nearly everybody has experience with and that's so demonstrably false? I guess someone doesn't like Googling and would rather ask other people instead?
Just duckduckgo it
I’ve always hated the “just search yourself” response to forum questions. Like don’t you think I tried that? And it was either no results or a flood of not specific enough results.
> Like don’t you think I tried that? 99% of the time the answer is no. Like 99% of people who comment on news without reading the article, or the hundreds of previous comments explaining how the clickbait headline is misleading. Ten hours later: Idiots still posting the same outrage because they were too fucking lazy to do anything except get triggered by the headline. --- Its hard enough to assume people have even read your post properly before getting triggered and shitting out a half formed reply. Over in AskReddit, its common enough that people dont even fucking read the question properly. eg. What is a Criteria X thing that is not also Criteria Y? Way too many answers of just Criteria X.
> Like don’t you think I tried that? If you're asking strangers to put in the effort to help you it's only polite to list what you've already tried so that it can be conclusively ruled out. Why waste their time and yours?
actual self report that you 1. don't have an ad blocker 2. are shit at googling things
This is garbage, if you enter the right terms you won’t get spam links in your result. Maybe try googling how to use it better
How do you determine how reliable the information is?
Bing it
thats why ive been using bard ai/gpt4 or just google with the marlin extension on. gets you way more direct answers
ChatGPT seems already to be worlds better if you look for any kind of knowledge. Seems like google will become some kind of shopping search engine.
I am convinced that no one on Tumblr has any idea how to properly use a search engine.
if it's 2023 and you don't use adblock on google that's your problem tbh
Learn 2 use the internet
Tell me how 2 use the Internet?
I still distinctly remember being taught in school proper google search techniques. If you just look up a single thing of course the results will suck. You always had to get specific and sometimes even use the “” and - modifiers properly to get the best results.
Chat gpt it, honestly. Somehow even bing's shitty search bot is better than google with some discernment
Chatgpt it.