If you want to find solutions online, stop using Google.
Sometimes I post stuff to my blog about things that I could not find a satisfying solution to and where I had to figure one out myself. I post those things because I want it to be discoverable by the next person who is searching for it.
I did a quick test, and my posts don’t show up anywhere on Google. I can find them via Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and even Bing. But Google doesn’t show my stuff, even when hitting specific keywords that only my post talks about. And if my site even shows up, it is only about +6 months after I posted.
Even tried their search console thing, it doesn’t report any issues with my site. So it must be the lack of ads, cookies, and AI generated content which makes Google suspicious of it.
So, If you are an engineer looking for solutions to your problems online, just stop using Google. It’s become so utterly useless, it’s ridiculous. Of course you will miss all the cool AI features and scam ads, but there’s always some drawbacks.
_Reposting my post from Mastodon yesterday, it felt relevant. infosec.exchange/
I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.
Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.
And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.
Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.
I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.
I always preferred deepl for translations. That is until I started using chatgpt which seem to usually do a much better job than either google or deepl (for the languages I have tried).
So it must be the lack of ads, cookies, and AI generated content which makes Google suspicious of it
If your site isn’t integrated with Google’s Adsense infrastructure it is immediately at a disadvantage as Google won’t scan your site anywhere near as often, and even when it does will put the results way below anything else that does. It’s not that it finds your site suspicious, it is simply incentivized to really look hard at all the other sites paying for service.
Google used to better than ddg like a year ago, now it’s almost completely unusable for development and I find myself going back to ddg and actually finding what I want instead of some unrelated nonsense, ads and LLM output crap
It kinda depends what you’re looking for. For technical stuff DDG is much better than Google (I don’t know about kagi) but for local information Google still gives better results. Google seems to return what it thinks you want to search for and not what you actually tell it to so for exact searches it’s always worse. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for Google can be better sometimes.
I totally came to say this. Google has become designed to tarpit you into staying on the site longer. They no longer have the goal of giving you what you want quickly, they want you to see more ads.
Google makes $307/yr. per user. They are strongly motivated to tarpit us. If we want a clean search experience we need to be open to the idea of paying.
As an embedded systems dev that searches a lot of obscure stuff, I use Kagi and love it. Go try its free searches and see for yourself.
If you value your time and mental stability, please do yourself a favor and go see what clean, high quality search results look like on Kagi.
In contrast to my experience, all the other search engines stink. Google is the only good one. But I suggest using a frontend like Araa if you want privacy.
Google’s been heading that way for a while, but goddamn this last month it’s completely shat the bed.
My fave was the other night whrn a search for ‘vast visual auditory sensory theatre’ (literal artist and album) gave me top results of scholarly articles. Trying to google song lyrics gave me fucking screen issues. Utterly useless now.
Yandex gives some fun results, when was the last time you saw non-reddit forum posts pop up?
Switched to Perplexity a year ago, but I occasionally still go to Google just from muscle memory. Google’s aggressively unhelpful now - it’s kinda insane.
I’ve been telling people to read ‘Cryptonomicon’ for decades.
It tells two interwoven stories. Back in WW2 the grandfather is involved in proactive missions to keep the Nazis from learning the Allies had broken their codes, and in the late 1990’s the grandson is trying to start an online bank
I’d read it twice before, but damned if it didn’t hook me up again. I got to the first airport around 10 am and didn’t get home until 3 am. Saved my sanity.
For the uninitiated, Reamde involves the kidnapped niece of a billionaire game maker; the game is really fun and also a money laundering operation. There are terrorists, Right Wing militias, undercover spies, demented science fiction authors, and a bear skin rug.
I remembering stumbling into this book at a shop a while back, reading the synopsis on the back and then the first page thinking “This should be fun.” I was not prepared for how enthralling and deep the story went. Perfect travel book, loved reading it on flights. Would be amazing to see it adapted as an HBO show, especially the hunt in the forest towards the end. I was laughing so hard!
So I get that most people assume these “converts” are full of shit and living a lie, and they’re actually gay, and blah blah blah.
I’m sure many of them are, but I’d guess a lot of them are bisexual, and lacking any real empathy, they assume all gay men can just choose to only go for women, like they did. They still want dick (and sometimes go get it anyway), but are okay with marrying a woman and having kids, and trying to ignore the part of them that wants men. They think of it as “resisting temptation” the same way a straight man resists the temptation of women other than his wife.
One of the most eye opening statements i have ever heard was from one of the wirst tv shows on the planet, where a trans man talked about what it was like growing up in conservative america. Where he was so scared because he thought he was gay. Only to later learn that trans people even exist and that he’s not “just” gay. I’m some average run of the mill hetero, i never had to even think about these things. Boy like girls and that hit for me and i was done and never had to think about it again. I can’t even comprehend how hard it has to be to pretend to not like other boys growing up. Or the bombshell it must be to realize that this already complicated thing got even more complicated.
Some might not realize that this is necessary to avoid the Australian sandworms. She was just trying to share her culture with us, and we gave her so much grief for it, smh.
The petition claims the 36-year-old set up her own governing body for breakdancing to qualify for the Games, misused funding and demanded an apology from her and Paris chef de mission Anna Meares.
That’s what it claims but it’s apparently all false allegations
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