The Toilet Theory of the Internet: Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster.

boem@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 365 points –
The Toilet Theory of the Internet
theatlantic.com
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The results aren’t easy when they’re useless tho.

Particularly an issue when you’re googling an obscure software issue, you just get spammed with the same copy/paste “troubleshooting” steps. Which usually boil down to “reinstall this completely unrelated driver”.

One of the biggest advantages of using Linux over windows is the lack of those endless seo sites while troubleshooting.

oh, they're there and they're just as useless. I'm the kind of person who refuses to remember things so I have been using google search to take me to the particular website which contains that one liner which I know fixes my issue. For the past 4 years or so, I started actually remembering a lot of things because it's impossible to get to those pages through all the spam.

A search for a specific question used to take me to a stack overflow page with that specific wording to which the answer was the specific command and a description of what it does. Now not only does google ignore half the search terms, but the first 5 results are crap websites with a long description which seems to be close to what i'm looking for only to prove to be useless 3 minutes in.

I was once searching Native-American in quotes and was getting Indian Ocean as a result.

Edit: I was searching for statistics on electrification of the reservations during the 1960's. It may have been "Indian" with

-ocean

…along with everything else. After all, if you reinstall everything from scratch the problem will maybe go away or you get too tired to go on

Particularly an issue when you’re googling an obscure software issue, you just get spammed with the same copy/paste “troubleshooting” steps. Which usually boil down to “reinstall this completely unrelated driver”.

Just reading this caused a small spike of ice cold fury within my soul