The Verge shows how Google search is useless

sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 1402 points –
Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers
theverge.com

The Verge published this spam article about the "best printers of 2024" to demonstrate how terrible Google's search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search "best printer" on Google.

I love a good, informative troll.

186

You are viewing a single comment

My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.

Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google's quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don't get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.

The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”

For me it’s programming issues. I guess devs know that doing SEO would shoot themselves in the foot.

Could you elaborate? You’re saying you’re going to google for programming issues, but at the same time devs don’t do SEO?

Sure. What I mean is that when I search for issues in duck duck go, I don’t see relevant results. But then I put “!g” and what I want (usually stack overflow or GitHub) comes to the top.

So it makes sense that programming sites do tags and keywords properly to optimize things for the user instead of trying promote their site no matter what.

At least that’s my guess anyway.

Stack overflow has been one of the consistently reliable googleable sites for decades.

It’s a shame Quora has strayed so far from their initial cloning of SO’s site. It seems to be turning into AskYahoo 2 fast from the results I’ve seen lately.

Yup. I constantly found myself appending !g for important queries that I needed an answer for right then and now. Google has stopped providing that commodity. It's almost never worth it anymore to fall back to Google.

4 more...