Wait until you see the AI generated blog posts being top results…
For certain languages and frameworks, LLMs are horrible right now because of this. Many answers I get are a Frankenstein of different versions.
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.
Hah!
No.
Soon enough the result will be an AI generated “blogpost”, generated by the search engine, in response to your query.
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.
It showed up for me about a month ago. I put up with it for about a week and then broke down and finally switched all my browser search engines to duckduckgo.
The funny thing is, I tried making this same switch a couple years ago. I legitimately had a harder time getting the results I needed and ended up switching back to Google.
Google is worse than useless to me now.
I’m sure all this nonsense waste of energy is exactly what we needed just to stop climate change.
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.
The worse part, you enter the blog, it looks legitimate enough at a glance, go straight to the code, then find out it’s bullshit.
We need ai blog blockers now…
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
Kagi only lists postgresql.org for the first 10 entries, but outdated ones in first place.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For the quick answer, it also uses the ‘outdated’ docs as source, but as it only gives a very shallow overview there shouldn’t be any difference in version (i.e. it checks for a value in a list in all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)
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.
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.
Trying to learn math on Wikipedia is an endless Sisyphean nightmare just trying to understand the first word in an unfamiliar vocabulary.
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.
entire KB system
And right before they did that, they started removing footnotes from KB articles that only dealt with older OSes, so if you ever needed to go back and find something, it just wasn’t there anymore. For example certain RGB packing formats were only supported on newer OSes and the footnote used to tell you that, but then it disappeared. I have been directly affected by that multiple times.
I wonder if the internet archive has a full copy of the KBs from before Microsoft dumped them. I’d love to set those up in a web server so I can reference them as needed.
Thank you!
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.
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 :)
I lucked out. Success at last! Now I can continue to code furiously doing things I know how to do.
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.
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This is the way.
Luckily the postgresql docs have links for exactly that
Huh, thats weird. Your chatgpt output looks just like a google result page.
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.
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I don’t mean to sour the funny, because it is funny/sad indeed, but
If you know you want the info from the official docs, why not do a search that forces results from that site, or search just for the official docs and then find the page you’re after on the docs themselves?
To be fair, back in the day you could get better results by relying on Google with
site:foobarand the Boolean/“power user” stuff. A lot of built-in search boxes on sites were a bit dodgy, or at least less flexible than AND/OR/NOT and other “power user tricks”.Of course, these days those seem to be ignored wholesale and even “verbatim quotes” are an utter crapshoot, this was back when Google didn’t fucking blow.
Nowadays I’m pretty sure stuff like site: foobar still works no? Idk I use ddg so I can’t say with certainty but I feel like “basic” power user stuff should still work right?
“site” does work still, I think, just plus a lot of irrelevant drivel - standard Google fare, you see it on Youtube too.
I’d consider the most basic case to be, specifically, the “quotes for verbatim results”, which definitely do not work anymore. Neither does + for a positively (hue hue) required term, a close second.
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Who are they profiting off of? I have never clicked an ad in my entire life.
Some of the ads are charged by CPM (cost per 1000 impressions), meaning Google get paid just because people see the ads. That’s similar to how ads in traditional media are billed - TV, billboards, newspapers, etc.
Not all ads use CPM though. Some use CPC (cost per click) and some use CPA (cost per action).
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Do they though? I don’t know a single person that has ever clicked on an ad. I know, sample size of one, but it just seems so basic to know not to click on them. Maybe those people really do exist. Sigh
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I have no idea how they make money, it never made sense to me. It still blows my mind to think there are that many people that click on ads, I just have a really hard time believing it still.
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The S means sales
Full for Sales Extraction Optimization
E ruined themselves. They push generic garbage on certain keywords, no matter how specific the rest is.
It would be funny, if it weren’t painfully true. DuckDuckGo sucks just as bad as Google. I hear there is a good search engine, but it costs money to use. Shocking. Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
may I ask what it is?
Oh yeah, I heard about this. Is it rly that much better?
I’ve been using it for a few months. It’s good. I get the official docs for my first result using OP’s query. 300 queries, their starting tier was not enough for my use. I was using DDG before and like it well enough. I’m not sure if it’s worth it but I like the idea of paying for services I use. I stopped using Google years ago because of all the captchas I had to fill due to my VPN
I’m cool with paying for quality, ad-free service but I feel like they’re giving way too little for what they’re asking. 300 searches a month? What is this AOL?
Agreed, I switched to their unlimited tier pretty quickly
Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
Do you expect free services with no catch? You either pay with money or with something else
You literally sent that from a FOSS platform…
I give lemmy money. Not so for google
You don’t have to give either money and there is the option to give both money.
Someone has to pay lemmy. If you don’t, it’s comparable to a free tier of a paid service. When I say “you” I don’t mean every single person. There’s no option to pay for google search that I’m aware of.
Not true because we’re getting the same experience whether we pay or not. The same kinda goes for google, they have other services you could pay to support them (please don’t), and it won’t make the search engine better. Big difference is one of them is actually free (full meaning of the word) and the other one is just usable without paying.
You’re still using a free platform to say good free software is not a thing tho, kinda weird.
Nobody has to pay for anything Lemmy or ActivityPub related because its FOSS.
That means Free Open Source Software.
As in, you can get and use the source code yourself without paying a single cent.
Can’t blame anyone but yourself if you use Google tbh
That’s why I use webcrwaler
Damn, y’all still using Google. Rip
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What are you using?
Brave is my go to for everything except image searching, for that I use DuckDuckGo.
Kagi. I haven’t felt the need to use anything else since I started using it.
Same, except searches for local stuff in my area, as Kagi is a bit US centric
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.
While I don’t miss checking the index of my wall of Microsoft books (the light gray binders with the squishy plastic). At least those were (mostly1) correct and ad free.
Then the future began and you got MSDN subscription on CD with sample code. Woohoo.
- they included a somewhat 20 pages of erratas that you sooner or later managed to memorize or punch and put in the correct place.
I use DDG at home, or Bing at work, for most topics they auto generate cards that give you the answer from the get go like 70% of the time
Stop using google.
DuckDuckGo is also being poisoned by SEO unfortunately. Some group of people managed to crack its algorithm, and as Google is slowly but fading relevancy, DuckDuckGo is now also has the same issues.
Yeah it’s getting worse too. It’s still far better than google, for now anyway.
I’ve been using Kagi for a year and am happy with it
For me even kagi didn’t provide a recent doc, but at least there is no garbage-sites (which I have blocked)
Thank you, I’ll be checking it out
