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Found this when looking for a meme I lost
(lemy.lol)
The lost meme in question was like this: A post on r/notinteresting saying "I don't know anything about programming, ask me anything." A comment asked "How to kill the child process?" Then replied to himself: Who reported me ๐
Googling and binging programming stuff really shows how much the instant answers, AI stuff and other "optimizatioms" have degraded search results. Every time I have to skip all that bullshit on the top to the actual results. Often, I even have to switch on verbatim mode. And even then it says "There don't appear to be a lot of good results..." or whatever, but the good result is right there, after I had to dance around all their hoops.
The search giants just don't understand that often there is just one good source for an information and it doesn't get repeated all the time, because it perfectly explains it, is brand new or just not something the kids on youtube or reddit would enjoy. They think people want to find things the web is plastered with. So weird.
The other day I was reading an highlighted result at the top of the page.
The highlight was something like "Use this."
But reading the full text the meaning was totally different, it was sort of... If you don't mind not having [thing I was searching] use this.
It's almost always the same feeling with anything AI related for me.
I'm trying out a paid Google called Kagi for a month.
It's pretty good so far and very fast.
And no ads or SEO prioritisation, which is the key part.
Or tracking/data-retention, so they say (it's not open source so we only have their word for it).
Speaking of degrading search results, people have begun phrasing questions like they would search queries so much that now when you search "how to X" it seems more likely to find a person posting a question worded "how to X" than it is to find actual answers.
Yeah. This is why I just search 'x documentation' and just go from there