Is it just me being fixated on this, or have the web search engines become entirely useless? Whatever I search for, I seem to get the same 17 best this, and best alternatives to that, and 21 great...and so on? The only way I seem to find stuff is when I already more or less know where something is to be found, like reddit, stack overflow, wikipedia, you know the obvious stuff.
1 year ago · 👍 satch, mathpunk
It's not just you. I set my default search engine to wikipedia a couple months ago, because I've found its a more reliable way to find information. Especially when I search for anything computer related, I seem to get a dozen articles that feel eerily bot-generated, some of which try to convince me to download unknown "tools" to fix a problem. I'll use a search engine only when something doesn't have a wiki article. · 1 year ago
In all fairness to the (formerly 'Do No') Evil Ones, there are problems of scale that hobby coders don't have to contend with. It's easy to moderate 1000 people. It's practically impossible to moderate billions of people. 10 million pages? The results are good. 100 billion pages? The results are going to be unreliable. Add to this the gamification of SEO and other commercialization pressures. Consider how Youtube "solved" the problem of controversial commentary channels by elevating establishement news, circa 2018. Many such "solutions" piled on top of one another have eroded the reliability of search, and much else. · 1 year ago
It's not just you. · 1 year ago