Google, then vs now
Google, then vs now
It's missing 2 pages of results that are nothing but bot-generated articles that contain garbage information and serve no purpose other than get you to view the ads on the page. And another 2 pages of nothing but ads written to look like honest reviews and comparisons of products.
115You’re missing the part where the results are infuriatingly answering a similar but not the same query because it’s more profitable to do so.
For example, looking up the part number of a transmission on my car, and then half the page is links to dealerships and repair shops. Not the answer to my question.
51That's what bothers me most--i used to be able to find technical help and info very easily. Nowadays it's all buried behind pages of bullshit--if you can find any of those forums at all. There's very few places to get good help at this point, and I'm afraid it's going to be even more difficult to find those places as time marches on.
14This is what worries me.
Forums were some of the best places to find specific information on niche topics. Were moderated and controlled in such a way to maintain the information and improve when new information was discovered.
But then social media killed many forums. Along with capitalism.
Many forums emulated social media, until they were no longer forums.
Others went the way of more ads than real posts.
All had their readership decrease, and many lost ability to host due to that.
10I wonder if this will increase the social value of being an expert in your field. These specific questions might become unsearchable in the near future due to AI garbage polluting the Internet.
Doing research on the Internet will become more in-depth once again. The search engines only a first step. You have to know what the meaningful resources are and how to use them. Back to the days of the academic database.
4
The sponsored stuff even has made its way into Waze. I placed a lunch Jimmy John's a few minutes ago, got in my car, told Waze to navigate to Jimmy John's, and the first result was for another store 32 miles away. Enshittification is stupid.
3
Missing the AI results at the top, with a non-zero chance of telling you some advice from reddit
40should have a braindead AI answer that tells you to add teeth to your fucking pancakes
38HE GOT TEETH ON HIS PANCAKES!!!
WHAT, THERE AREN'T ENOUGH IN YOUR MOUTH CUZZA ALL THE DICK YA SUCK?!
2plz don't tell AI you want f***ing pancakes !!!
2Hm… now I actually do want to see pancakes fucking
1
Also forgetting the part where every question about how to do something results in a 5m video. For fuck sakes, just write the list of steps out for me.
Example: How do I reset the oil service indicator on my vehicle?
Answer: hold x button for 10 seconds
32Ugh, the number of YouTube channels that should be blogs is infuriating. The last thing I need is to watch someone slowly type out their code into an editor, and then be unable to copy the text because it’s a video.
14It's the modern equivalent of cookbook recipes. I don't need to know about how your grandpa used to fix tractors and inspired three generations of mechanics, I want to know how to spray starter fluid in my vehicle's air intake.
5Teaching young people (18-23ish), I regret to say that many people prefer the video. I don't get it, especially since it's not like they're not strong readers- they text as much as anyone else.
Social norms? Attention span? Actual reading comprehension? It makes no sense, they prefer a 90 minute recording of the course over a study guide I give out with the same stuff, and wonder why they have no free time...
2I think it's just what they're used to, same as us preferring written instructions. People like things that are familiar.
4I understand it if there's some mechanical thing that's easier to see in video. Otherwise no, I hate it.
4As an 18-23 person for me it depends
My only examples are games because I have not finished my coffee but in say Zelda where I need to physically go somewhere I’d prefer a video instead of going left right right straight left too confusing for me
For about everything else I prefer text, for example I got stuck on a boss in v rising so I look up a text guide to learn the move set a little better because I’d rather have that knowledge of what’s going to happen rather than seeing it step by step
Also lets me skip past and ignore the BS
I also like text cus it’s easier to take in for me, I can re read the exact part I need to over and over but sometimes I get annoyed need to watch the 8 second segment preceding the part I didn’t catch 60 times in a row
3
It's essentially worthless now
23I miss when search engines would just tell you if they didn't find anything. Now it's "hmm, we removed some of your terms in order to show you lots and lots of results instead of none!"
19Putting the terms in quotes helps sometimes
5The more I do quotes, the less I get nowadays. I have completely given up on Google search. It has been terribad. I use Startpage and DDG now.
7
I switched to Duck Duck Go about a month ago, I'm pretty happy with how it works overall. I do miss the direct answers at the top but I can always use Google for that if need be (like how tall is so and so)
14You could use bing which DDG uses. It does the direct answer thing on top.
4DDG still uses Bing as a backend. Ive been using Brave search and have been really happy with it. They even have their own implementation of AI with search results if you're interested in that. They also use bangs which you might be used to from DDG. Highly recommend search.brave.com
1I'll give it a look, thank you!
1
Now the first thing it shows me is an AI generated amalgam of every article they could find and it's almost always wrong because the AI apparently can't distinguish between bullshit click bait articles and the actual content I was looking for...
13I switched to using multiple search engines and set DDG as my default search engine because Google ruined its own results. Still use Google on occasion, but really barely at all compared to the previous 20 years.
11Bog Brain Searching today:
Hey ChatGPT, research xyz for, compare options, present as table...
Work 15+ min done in less than 15s.
3