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 If you click on the top link from google, you would see there’s a notice that the page is outdated, with a link to a current version, but said link is dead.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.
" 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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
i wonder how much effort would it take to index all official documentation pages & stackoverflow, and push it into one big search engine
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)
Well internet enshitification is real…
spoiler
sdfsaf
2020 has become the decade of reading books. Search results these days are so bad.
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.
deleted by creator
Me: “How do I write my own Rawinput handler?”
Search results: “Here’s how you setup Rawinput in this competitive FPS, and look how it reduces input latency by a single milisecond! After 2-3 pages of AI generated SEO garbage full of misinformation, you might find something else besides of the official MS docs.”
Me: “Okay, this is not working, maybe I should look for some another preexisting SDL alternative, maybe at least one of them isn’t an even bigger dumpster fire than SDL itself.”
Search results: “Duuuude, have you heard of this game making tool, called Gamemaker? It doesn’t need coding, and it’s totally the same thing, because some people mistakingly called SDL a game engine, and now my AI hallucinates it as such. If you’re up to a bigger challenge, then there’s always Godot, or DirectX, which my AI also hallucinates being a game engine!”
Wait, Godot isn’t a game engine? I always thought it was one.
It is but DirectX ain’t
This is why I jumped ship to DuckDuckGo like 4-5 years ago already, never looked back
Coincidentally, yesterday I was quickly setting up a new computer for some testing whilst talking to somebody about another so I was half distracted. I did a search for some package to install and got absolute unusable crap. I didn’t understand, tried again, tried different search parameters and it just got worse, and then I noticed that, since this was a new computer, the browser was using google.
I switched to DDG, and first page first hit was what I needed.
DDG also has been in a steady decline and apparently has been using Bing as it’s back-end now. I’d love to use a self hosted open source browser, or of not that, an open source federated search engine, akin to Lemmy, but I don’t see either coming into existence anytime soon.
as its* back end now
Yeah, auto correct isn’t my friend
This is why I’ve really grown attached to Kagi (paid search engine).
It’s made the internet usable again. I’m honestly surprised how much of difference there is. I’d really recommend people give it a shot. (there’s a free trial for it)
Isn’t Kagi an AI company with a bunch of shady shit going on? I’m always extremely skeptical of these posts.
I don’t know what shady shit you’re referring to. They do AI, but I don’t use any of that. IMO their core strength is the search engine and how it works for you rather than against.
I never heard anything before this, so I looked around, and there’s definitely some posts about it.
https://www.osnews.com/story/139270/do-not-use-kagi/
I’ll have to give them a read.
For now, ignore my recommendation, as I don’t yet fully know my stance on this, with the information provided.
However, I can say that I’ve been super happy with the search results. I don’t use their email service. Just the search and the access to all of the LLMs that are out there.
A paid search engine… 🤔
Many people would prefer a paid service over an ad supported one.
Many people would prefer that their search history isn’t associated to personal and payment information.
We’ve been conditioned. Everything has a cost.
Stop using Google, dumbass.
