I definitely feel the pain when it comes to worthless results nowadays. Though in this case DDG comes through:
Adding documentation to the search makes the “correct” page soar to the top:
Google is better as a verb than a search engine.
I use “search” as a verb
Haha, nope. The links points to a table of contents after which you are on your own. The right link should point to a specific page instead, but the problem here is that postres docs are poorly optimized for search engines. If you click on the top link from google, you would see there’s a notice that the page is outdated, with a link to a current version, but said link is dead. It’s not an issue I’ve ever experienced with mysql docs for example.
And yes, w3schools, despite how terrible it is, is still above the official docs because it is more popular with newbies. I remember a time when I just started, I preferred sites like it, because they were simple and on point, rather than technically correct and comprehensive like the official docs are. If you forgot the feeling, try learning math on wikipedia (assuming you don’t have a math degree).
For the rest I cannot argue. Generated/AI shit is indeed ruining the internet and search engines giving up and joining them isn’t helpful either.
Trying to learn math on Wikipedia is an endless Sisyphean nightmare just trying to understand the first word in an unfamiliar vocabulary.
After which ctrl+f " in" takes you to the correct chapters. I do agree that a direct link would be more helpful.
And for learning postgresql I agree it isn’t very helpful - using their tutorial links, w3schools or something like udemy if you prefer video format is the way to go in that use case.I remember back when you were told to learn to work with the documentation, not memorize it, because you will always have access to it as a reference. Maybe bookmarking reference books/documentation will make a come back as the search engines degrade.
Surely the word ‘in’ would appear countless times out of context on the table of contents.
You can press alt-w though to only show full word matches
" in" appears 25 times on the page to be exact, with 16 of those being in the table of contents and 9 being in the text afterwards.
“in” appears 54 times, as you know end up hitting “string” and so on.Had I known that the functions table of contents was as short as it is I would probably have just scrolled.
This is partly why I prefer Firefox’s implementation of the find feature - it allows case-sensitive search while Chrome does not support it.
Kagi only lists postgresql.org for the first 10 entries, but outdated ones in first place. With the programming scope it collapses all official do s entries to one, with GH and SO filling the rest.
For the quick answer, it also uses the ‘outdated’ docs as source, but as it only gives a very shallow overview there shouldn’t be any difference in version (i.e. it checks for a value in a list in all versions the same, and quick answer leaves out details specific to different versions)
Wait until you see the AI generated blog posts being top results…
Hah!
No.
Soon enough the result will be an AI generated “blogpost”, generated by the search engine, in response to your query.
I’m sure all this nonsense waste of energy is exactly what we needed just to stop climate change.
That’s already been happening for about a month now… perhaps only for some users? Often the AI results are straight up lies.
I’ve seen some fucking hilariously wrong AI math.
There has been something similar for years: a page that basically says “Yeah, nah, we don’t have any information for that, but you might be interested in a totally irrelevant something else”, but phrased in a way that gets it high in the results. What’s astonishing is that Google doesn’t punish those pages.
Why would they punish pages that help them serve more ads? There are ads on the search, ads on the useless result, ads when you refine the query.
Yeah, you have a point, but then it’s a bit hypocritical of them to even have criteria for putting pages up in the results.
I was looking up some tips for Baldurs Gate missions and these fking AI generated pieces of shit with hallucinated fake playthroughs ruined the whole experience.
For certain languages and frameworks, LLMs are horrible right now because of this. Many answers I get are a Frankenstein of different versions.
I get quite a bit of flak from my colleagues for paying for search, but I kid you not, I don’t regret splurging on a Kagi subscription at all. It’s personally less stressful for me, having to wade through less cruft, and I think I even work significantly faster because of how I use it.
It’s sad when you think about it. Search was such a good experience in the past.
I also pay for Kagi and I’m super happy with that decision. I do wish they’d stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.
I was against the ai integrations until I started actually trying them… quick answers are awesome.
With most topics, I find fastgpt to be the most up to date, accurate and best sourced. And with just a normal search there’s basically just one expandable strip with AI, no real annoyance for me.
Try being a programmer in the 90s. Just like that but with no entries at all
I’m guessing it was more like “Let me pull this book off the shelves and wade through that for the answers”
And the book had all the answers.
The book had half ass answers. Their examples rarely had anything to do with reality.
So not a whole lot has changed. I cringe thinking of all the youtube video that explain OOP like this
class Animal: class Dog(Animal):Jesus… You should worn a man before you try to trigger his PTSD.
It was called The x86 Assembly Bible and I would not have been able to do much of anything without it.
Yeah. Can I get a book - usually something official like K&R for C.
I learnt C on an Amiga. No memory protection at all. Pointer errors would likely need a reboot to recover.
I rebooted a lot.
I also learned C on the Amiga. I loved SAS C. I also came across C++ first on the Amiga when it was just a pre processor for C. I really loved that machine but it was the community that was special
Okay, Yahoo and AskJeeves didn’t have anything useful. Let’s try this Google thing.
Altavista. Back when keywords still meant something.
In desperation you click the link to the old docs, change the version to the latest version and pray you don’t get a 404
Oh, that stuff happens all the time. The one that really pissed me off was Microsoft 404-ing basically their entire KB system.
That thing was standing for so long you could still find Windows 9x stuff on it, and it was glorious.
Around the time they stopped supporting windows 7, they bricked the entire thing up and started a new system. Overnight, all the Microsoft help article links went dead. Find a good forum post about an issue that you’re having and someone replied with a link to the MS KB saying little more than “this should work” followed by a sea of commenters saying thanks, that worked, but when you follow the link, it goes nowhere.
What a fucking waste.
Been there. Done that. FML on searching for programming help some days. Versioning is a nightmare as the way you “used” to do things is no longer relevant and the rest of the results are some asshole saying it is a duplicate question that was answered 10 years ago…that is no longer fucking relevant!
Sorry. Yesterday sucked. I hope today is less frustration and more things working like they are supposed to.
As someone who is trying to teach themselves a few new things this year by diving to projects using them… I seriously, seriously feel you. It honestly makes me question whether I should just abandon each project I start, both professional and personal.
All the relevant hits are from years and/or 2+ versions of whatever ago or forum posts with dead links to an alleged solution.
I feel like in the past I could just dive into something and search my way through it. Now I feel like that era is over and I question whether it’s me, my niche project idea, the disappearing community, or just the search engines.
The answer to your question is that all the info is in chat apps now
Multiple times I have searched for a question and found a single SO answer from years back that was my own, with no replies.
I hope something nice happens to you today :)
Third result in DDG.
What it’s like to use Google in 2024
But they’re so innovative! They absolutely aren’t deserving of a massive antitrust lawsuit… /s
Something is not perfect in the world. Gosh, I sure hope the American government comes along soon and corrects this by force.
Eh I mean alphabet and Google do have legitimate reasons for antitrust lawsuits, but that’s independent of how shit Google search has become.
Anyway, for those who are fed up with the terrible results, use Ecosia. I’ve basically never needed to use anything else and the advertising money goes towards planting trees responsibly to rebuild ecosystems.
Anti-trust is not about seeking perfection, it’s a defense against abuses of power. That’s a good thing unless you like to be abused by the powerful, in which case lick some more boots.
you’re right to be sarcastic, better sit back and shut up and wait for the free market to fix it /s
It makes me sad because Google used to be great. The main feature that made Google great was the click rejection. Basically the search would know when you clicked on a link and didn’t come back to the search results. This action would add weight to that result as “this probably has the information that was being searched for” so it would be nearer to the top later when others made similar queries.
This was their killer feature, it basically crowd sourced the correct information. After a small amount of time, the correct results would kind of float to the top so subsequent searches would put those results near the top to help satisfy queries faster.
Now? They seem to want to give you results that satisfy their partners, and keep you tied to the results page as long as possible. The focus seems to have shifted from being a good search engine with accurate results, to a meme of how to make money.
Never before has this shift been more clear to me than right now, directly in the wake of I/O 2024; an event my friends have taken to calling AI/O. Pretty much every single presentation was about Gemini and AI generated garbage, but this isn’t what made Google’s new direction clear to me. In the last 20-30 minutes of the event it was made perfectly clear what they were doing with I/O. And to drive the point home, every I/O has showcased stuff you can’t use yet, stuff they’re working on, and other cool shit. Some of it cost money, but there was usually some stuff that was just done because it could be done and it would be made available at some point, a nontrivial amount of it was free. At AI/O, the entire focus was on AI, with little to no non-AI stuff in there, at all, then at the end, they kicked everyone in the shorts. Here’s our prices to access this shit. Buy it. As far as I’m concerned AI/O was a gigantic marketing circle jerk to sell their AI.
It seems that Google has entered the final phases of enshittification.
Saw an article that said that some execs demanded for search to have better user retention. I.e make the user search multiple times to find what they’re looking for, so they can be shown more ads.
I can’t wait for this to spread to unrelated areas!
Supermarkets maximizing profit: put ads everywhere and hide the most commonly bought foods!
Gas stations maximizing profits: unskippable ads on all pumps, plus the pump stops halfway to make you watch another ad.
Dating apps: oh… They already killed themselves. Swipe swipe swipe swipe. Hide messages. Hide likes. Reduse exposure to profile unless paid member.
I hate this future.
Supermarkets maximizing profit: put ads everywhere and hide the most commonly bought foods!
Many supermarkets already do things like putting the milk and bread at opposite sides of the store, so you have to walk through the whole store to get both. You’d often be walking past the end caps while doing so, which are essentially ads (companies pay to have their products displayed at the end caps)
To be fair, milk at the back of the store is better to keep the milk cold from getting out of the truck and into the fridge.
It’s frustrating because it’s all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can’t really get mad at it. It’s just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
What if peoples relationships create a superstructure no single human can control, and we need active collective effort to supercede it?
If a single human refuses from a moral standpoint, a humongous amount of money to do something crap as CEO controller of whichever crap company, boards will replace them, and some other human will, because material condition dictate it has to be done. No one is really in control. The boards are all just optimising for profit, because if they’re not, someone else will.
How to break the capitalist cycle of control over peoples will?
In real life? I’m not sure. Years of struggle to change government to enforce regulations, break up consolidation of power, blah blah blah.
In a like ttrpg or movie? Murder. Murder the board and other management and anyone they replace until the greed stops.
Just in case you’re not just satirically listing things that are already awful;
Supermarkets increase their “retention” by limiting signage to keep you wandering and avoid “just get that thing and go” shopping. I don’t know how common this is, but when I was a kid the major supermarkets had long lists of what items were in each aisle, plus highly visible signs in the aisle to show exactly where each category was. Now days at the major chains those in aisle signs are completely gone, and the categories have been whittled down to a few major categories; most products aren’t represented on the sign at all e.g. you have to assume “cake mix/decorating” are in the same aisle as “flour”.
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular. Mobil is particularly bad for it in my experience.
The square button second from the bottom mutes the audio. I’ve taken to carrying a marker in my car and writing “<— MUTE” next to them. Alternatively, a small screwdriver between the speaker grating.
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular
I never see these in my area… Maybe only some places have them?
Supermarkets already optimise many things, products with lower margins are at the bottom in aisles, and all the junk food or cheap liquor is next to the cashier.
Also, ever been to IKEA? That thing’s a labyrinth
It’s a path but, also its always been like that. Also there is a supermarket with the same idea, HEB center market.
“alright, we need to make our service worse to satisfy our real customers”
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn’t perfect because you wouldn’t get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
I’d be interested if you can get anywhere.
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google’s algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I’d be interested if you get any progress here. I’ve never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
How did google manage to be worse than yandex?
By rewarding mysterious “quality content” indicators that SEOs know how to game with shit people absolutely do not perceive as quality.
That’s the closest one so far, actually.
Tried it on Bing too for comparison, 4th result and it’s actually the current version.
Oh please don’t make me use Bing.
I will make you keep a postgreql docs tab open and use its search bar
Mistakes were made. It happens, OK? I’m quite certain Bing won’t let THAT happen again…/////
For my, VERY limited needs for the tiny bit I have dabbled in programing or even just help with some Linux issues, I’ve been using Phind. It seems to work a whole lot better than any of the other search engines. But my needs can’t really twist the tail like real programmers.
Well internet enshitification is real…
You are confusing Google and Internet… they are very different things.
Judging by Google’s chokehold over web browsers and websites in general, they’re not that different…
so apparently google search is just shitty now, that’s the takeaway here.
spoiler
sdfsaf
The S means sales
Full for Sales Extraction Optimization
I feel like I’ve been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like “yeah, maybe it’s gotten a bit worse? Haven’t really noticed”
i wonder how much effort would it take to index all official documentation pages & stackoverflow, and push it into one big search engine
