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 If you click on the top link from google, you would see there's a notice that the page is outdated, with a link to a current version, but said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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Anti-trust is not about seeking perfection, it's a defense against abuses of power. That's a good thing unless you like to be abused by the powerful, in which case lick some more boots.
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.
Well internet enshitification is real...
You are confusing Google and Internet.... they are very different things.
Judging by Google's chokehold over web browsers and websites in general, they're not that different...
You're confusing the web with the internet. But I don't blame you because OP did that too.
Doesn't mean the statement is less true, the enshitification of google is a symptom, the disease is the internet as a whole. Google and LLMs screwing the web, M$ screwing windows, Apple's existence by itself, Meta monopolizing and screwing social media, and don't get me started with streaming platforms and other media industries are all symtoms.
Considering all of that, yes, the internet enshitification is very real.
Symptoms of what?
But anyway, the cool thing about the internet is that you can find your nice cozy niche and stay there.
That's how the 90s internet was. If the megacorps want to be in here, fine. I'll just stay in Lemmy. And when Lemmy starts sucking, I'll move to somewhere else.
It's not just google, google is just the most popular, so a lot of the seo is targeted for it
I mean its both but....
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.
Just in case you're not just satirically listing things that are already awful;
Supermarkets increase their "retention" by limiting signage to keep you wandering and avoid "just get that thing and go" shopping. I don't know how common this is, but when I was a kid the major supermarkets had long lists of what items were in each aisle, plus highly visible signs in the aisle to show exactly where each category was. Now days at the major chains those in aisle signs are completely gone, and the categories have been whittled down to a few major categories; most products aren't represented on the sign at all e.g. you have to assume "cake mix/decorating" are in the same aisle as "flour".
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular. Mobil is particularly bad for it in my experience.
The square button second from the bottom mutes the audio. I've taken to carrying a marker in my car and writing "<--- MUTE" next to them. Alternatively, a small screwdriver between the speaker grating.
The ones near me don't have buttons of any kind
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular
I never see these in my area... Maybe only some places have them?
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)
To be fair, milk at the back of the store is better to keep the milk cold from getting out of the truck and into the fridge.
It's frustrating because it's all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can't really get mad at it. It's just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
Supermarkets already optimise many things, products with lower margins are at the bottom in aisles, and all the junk food or cheap liquor is next to the cashier.
Also, ever been to IKEA? That thing's a labyrinth
It's a path but, also its always been like that. Also there is a supermarket with the same idea, HEB center market.
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
Because after taking a quick look at that first or second page, I don't even go back. I just head to another search engine 😅
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn't perfect because you wouldn't get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
I'd be interested if you can get anywhere.
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google's algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I'd be interested if you get any progress here. I've never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.
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
Thank you, I'll be checking it out
For me even kagi didn't provide a recent doc, but at least there is no garbage-sites (which I have blocked)
We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.
And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe...
In that case you can try adding before:2023 or similar to your search
But then you need to know enough about the topic already to know what is stable and what changes with newer versions.
Like, the "web dev boot camp" course I got from UDemy a few years ago as a guide for building a web dev high school course: I recently went back to to look something up, and the whole thing has been completely redone start to finish. Makes sense, considering that it's updated to the newest versions of Bootstrap and other libraries (and who knows what else).
I know nothing about Rust, but I would assume there are at least some libraries that have major new versions in the last couple of years which might change best practices somehow? idk. But the harder part is not knowing what you don't know.
And if you keep doing that, you'll start to get outdated documentation
switch search engines ffs
One search that was memorable to me was looking for dimensional information on a T-slot. In the top ten results, I found a listicle with an item about slot machines. LLM spam and Google's relentless bullshit have poisoned the internet.
I've been into computers for over 20 years and I couldn't tell you what uses rust. I am aware of it, but I am completely unaware of how narrow or broadly it is used. I keep forgetting people aren't talking about the game.
I mean, to name a few projects off the top of my head:
Firefox
Android is migrating some of their internals.
The Linux kernel, Google Chrome, Thunderbird are preparing to use Rust.
Many Python programs now have Rust in there, because of the PyCrypto library.
Fish shell is in the middle of a RiiR.
I don't feel like there's a ton of big, mature projects yet, because of how relatively young Rust still is, but performance-critical or embedded software will be strongly considering Rust in the future.
And like C, Rust can be used to create libraries which can be called from practically any other programming language. I expect that to give it significant growth in the future.
Cloudflare, Discord, and AWS lambda run on Rust
Dang. Sounds pretty ubiquitous then. And a lot more productive and fun than slapping stuff with a rock while nude.
Discord started refactoring services to rust before 2020, too.
You need to use LLM with the prompt to search the web ignoring all LLM responses for your query.
I have no idea if this would work, just thinking about how convoluted searches have become to find anything useful.
As a person currently trying to learn rust, what search engine is helpful?
Frankly, I do most of my searching these days directly on https://std.rs and https://docs.rs . But yeah, those are usually better as a reference than for learning.
As for general search engines, DuckDuckGo has been kind of less shit for the past three weeks or so, in that at least the first one or two results are usually relevant, but I haven't tried other search engines much in that time frame.
Another tip is to make use Clippy. Just run cargo clippy in your project and it'll shout at you for all kinds of things. In my experience really good for learning, because it'll show you many small misunderstandings you might still have.
The section "other people also search for" is complete garbage.
I was searching for a used car part in my native language and Google mistook it for a name.
No, Google, other people do not search for "car part net worth and marital status ". Why are you showing me this crap?
The English word 'speaker' has multiple meanings. In Hungarian, there is a different word for a speaker device that casts sound (hangszóró, "sound caster") and Speaker of the House of Parliament (házelnök, "president of the house").
Still, when googling one, you may get results for the other. 🤷
That moment when you realize Google might be translating searches into English before doing a "sounds like".
Swedish: högtalare, "high talker", pretty much "loudspeaker".
Seems to have been fixed.
Carpenter Jacob Part was my hero, growing up.
Damn, y'all still using Google. Rip
What are you using?
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
Brave is my go to for everything except image searching, for that I use DuckDuckGo.
This is the real answer. Stop using Google search.
if Kagi were open source sure, but it's $10 a month and the CEO is kind of an asshole. And a generative-AI-bro (please don't make me call them GAI-bros)
It pisses me off that Java's class library documentation is at a totally different URL for every version. You can't just change 11 to 21 in the URL.
Try being a programmer in the 90s. Just like that but with no entries at all
I'm guessing it was more like "Let me pull this book off the shelves and wade through that for the answers"
And the book had all the answers.
It was called The x86 Assembly Bible and I would not have been able to do much of anything without it.
Yeah. Can I get a book - usually something official like K&R for C.
💯 came here to say that.
I learnt C on an Amiga. No memory protection at all. Pointer errors would likely need a reboot to recover.
I rebooted a lot.
I also learned C on the Amiga. I loved SAS C. I also came across C++ first on the Amiga when it was just a pre processor for C.
I really loved that machine but it was the community that was special
Okay, Yahoo and AskJeeves didn't have anything useful. Let's try this Google thing.
Altavista. Back when keywords still meant something.
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.
Godot is a game engine.
SDL, on the other hand, is not, and instead is a multimedia layer (middleware) often used for game development.
One could argue that game engines constitute as middleware, but in reality, most modern game engines are way more than that, and instead often rely on other middleware nowadays (e.g. OpenGL, or even SDL for some). This, alongside with people mistakingly calling SDL a game engine, leads to stuff like this.
I think that remark was only meant for directx, and the ai lumps it with godot.
Pretty sure it is, might just be their grammar.
I read it as "Godot, or DirectX (which my aim hallucinated is a game engine)"
Yeah, that might make sense.
It is but DirectX ain't
This thing in quotes?
Searching for not that!
Did you mean that?
Okay, here's nothing.
Interestingly, bing of all things turns up better results than Google with the same search terms, first 3 blocks are "popular results", first is tutorial sites, second is w3 schools and third takes you to the current docs for functions and operators.
If you ignore those, the fourth result takes you to the current docs for comparison functions and operators. I'd prefer it taking you right to the official docs on the first result, but comparatively acceptable. It was memed to death but I've seriously found it more useful than Google these days, comparable to ddg's results.
Did not know that, for some reason I thought it was (or at one time was) based on Google's
If you're going through that route, SearX beats everything and it's not even close. It's self hosted and takes search results from any engine you check in a config, different config for search categories, ... Rn I'm mostly getting results from brave, qwant, and duckduck.
Gotta acknowledge the bing copilot tho, it's pretty decent, but requires to use edge or bing app in android, so i only use it when I'm lazy or I'm searching for something too obscure for searx.
SearX
i hate that name lol
I've used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google's (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.
I have a half thought that maybe bing works well for technical searches because it's the default search engine for edge and depending on the company, you may or may not be able to use a different browser and I'll be real, I tend to leave my work laptop setting as default as possible unless particularly awful.
i read something a few years ago, that it was better, because bing don't have many users, so they couldn't rely on AI, and because everyone was using google, sites didn't optimize for bing SEO, not sure how much time it has, with microsoft obsession with AI
I feel like I've been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like "yeah, maybe it's gotten a bit worse? Haven't really noticed"
::: spoiler spoiler
sdfsaf
:::
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.
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.
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.
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.
DDG always used bing backend tho, what's happening is bing backend worsening
bing itself is unusable tho. I get a full page of "sponsored links" before any tentatively relevant search result pop up. DDG at least removes the sponsored bullshit.
For what it's worth, DDG isn't perfect either. There are plenty of times I have to use Google instead. I don't keep track of how often it anything but it's definitely not perfect.
Well, that is what I said. Dog isn't as great as it used to be
searx is around for a couple of years now.
as its* back end now
Yeah, auto correct isn't my friend
it already exists and it's called Yacy, an open source decentralized search engine
apparently has been using Bing as it's back-end now.
A lot of stuff uses Bing to search, as it's the largest search engine with an official public API that any developer can just sign up and use. Voice assistants like Alexa use Bing too.
Is.... Is Microsoft the good guy here? Tell me it ain't so!
Someyhing like searxng? Or what do you imagine?
On duckduckgo it was only the the 4th result! Pretty decent.
Had to test with Kagi also, leads with official documentation, after that tutorials and unofficial things. Nothing obviously irrelevant. The only thing with the Kagi results, was that there were a few very simmilar official documentation links (for different postgresql versions) at top. But, still good search results. Not sure why anyone is still using google, when there are quite a few better alternatives availale
The power of defaults, comfort, not wanting to pay, and probably worse non English results
Tried it on Bing too for comparison, 4th result and it's actually the current version.
Oh please don't make me use Bing.
I will make you keep a postgreql docs tab open and use its search bar
Mistakes were made. It happens, OK? I'm quite certain Bing won't let THAT happen again......../////
For my, VERY limited needs for the tiny bit I have dabbled in programing or even just help with some Linux issues, I've been using Phind. It seems to work a whole lot better than any of the other search engines. But my needs can't really twist the tail like real programmers.
Kagi:
First result is the official documentation with the page that contains information about the in operator
Though if I would use postgresql documentation very often I could just use the Kagi feature that rewrites URLs with a regex, so I can replace it always with the latest version.
Change domains to a preferred domain (reddit.com to old.reddit.com)
Fixing links to outdated documentation with bad SEO
Rewriting proxied pages (like Google AMP) to their source URL
Changing any http link to https
Interesting, my Kagi results gave W3Schools, geeks for geeks, and postgresqltutorial.com before the official docs, but hey still way better than OP's results!
Kagi has search personalization where you can lower/raise/pin specific domains (one of kagis main selling points) and I blocked geeks for geeks and w3schools, as these are irrelevant for me and I don't want them in my results
can't you do that on a self-hosted searxng? I know you can do that with YaCY, but YaCY search results kinda suck
I don't think that's possible with searxng (but I'm not 100% sure, but I can't seem to find that feature)
I know there are browser extensions which can filter out domains in search results for different search engines like google and duckduckgo.
But the pinning/lowering/raising is a bit trickier to implement as an extension, because what kagi does is basically:
Load 3 pages of search results in the backend
Show a result as the first entry if it matches a rule for pinning
Influence the search ranking algorithm with the lower/raise rules of the user
Filter out blocked domains
It would be possible but not as "streamlined" as Kagi does.
Don't get me wrong, Kagi definitely has its rough edges and the search ranking algorithm is sometimes very unpredictable, but it provides good enough results for me to be worth the 10$ per month for unlimited searches.
Stop using Google, dumbass.
Yeah.
Huh, thats weird. Your chatgpt output looks just like a google result page.
so apparently google search is just shitty now, that's the takeaway here.
Kagi ftw.
Your result returns version 9.0 that went EOL 2021, same as Googles fourth result in OP.
nvm, second result is correct.
Interesting how the second "correct result" is years older
Seems creation time not modified. Makes sense “current” is older.
yeah not ideal, but if the actual functionality of that operator hasn't changed then I wouldn't expect the version to matter. Same with searching most ruby stuff and getting old results. it hasn't changed in decades, it ain't changing now. But I did scroll down and literally every result was from the postgres docs so that's a marked improvement from the google results.
DuckDuckGo ain't too bad either. 👍
Can’t blame anyone but yourself if you use Google tbh
That's why I use webcrwaler
We need a human-curated Internet search. A wiki of good web content.
I forgot how this worked until I discovered NeoCities.
I suddenly remenbered when so many personal websites would have some page that's like "links" or "sites I love" or "other cool people", etc. And it was just a curated list of sites the author thought were neat.
And your bookmark function was actually really helpful, because "web surfing" was literally jumping from link to link to link, following rabbitholes and breadcrumb trails across the web.
Nowadays, I bookmark things but I never go back through them. I know Firefox sometimes automatically helps you remember stuff in your bookmarks though.
But there was a time when it felt like finding some niche site was a sort of secret club or cool treasure, and you had to make sure you could find your way back. :)
When you didn't make the bookmark, you were basically trying to backtrack which links you followed and what sites you visited to get back to that one website.
Totally! And I loved those neat little animated web badges that became really popular, especially on forums.
I still have those on one of the forums I occasionally still visit, but it might disappear soon after nearly 2 and a half decades.
Please.
Maybe web rings are due for a comeback.
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
I searched for Magic The Gathering cards earlier on my phone (FireFox mobile), and got YouTube shorts in the results. This was in addition to a large amount of useless info panels and junk in the search results. I just wanted the official links or even an Amazon URL to the upcoming precons, not slowly regurgitated info!
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:foobar and 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.
Because Google decided years ago that relevancy is less important than profitability.
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).
Doesn't matter, billions of other people do, and they prioritize ads, and results with AdSense on the pages above relevancy. They'll even show you shit results to keep you searching longer, which allows them to show you more ads.
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
Do you think Google has become one of the most powerful & profitable companies on the planet through a revenue model that doesn't work? Of course people click them. If people didn't click them then Google would have gone bankrupt decades ago. One thing I learned years ago is that I use the Internet very differently than an average person, and I constantly overestimate the intelligence and knowledge of the average person. Corporations bank on stupidity, because it's abundant.
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.
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?
Not the one you replied to but they're probably talking about Kagi. I crunched the numbers a while back and the higher tiers were kind of hard to make worthwhile, however iirc they simplified the pricing slightly since then.
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.
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 (mostly^1^) 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.
Must be an old screenshot because there's now half a page of Gemini AI garbage at the very top now.
Highly recommend using the uBlacklist extensions to filter out the garbage, spam, copycat, useless sites that somehow seem to always beat out legitimate sources in SEO.
don't use Google, problem solved
I only use it for web stuff but W3Schools is usually pretty solid so I wouldn’t be mad having that as a first result.
Funny, we all used to avoid W3Schools because it was a heavily SEO’d ad farm, but nowadays it’s actually a Web 2.0 oasis in a hellscape of infinite scrolling AI bullshit. I’ve found myself using it over SO since their surrender to OpenAI.
Web 2.0 oasis
💀
Bing also grabs w3Schools as the top / AI result. However, the AI result also lets you swap to a Stack Overflow result.
And it has a bar across the top linking to different parts of the official website, including the landing page for the documentation.
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 never heard anything before this, so I looked around, and there's definitely some posts about it.
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.
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.
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.
I generally agree with that, but as an aggregation service it would need to justify not providing any actual content/information with its price structure. The same argument against AI models trained with user data.
It still costs money for hardware and hosting. Scraping web and training AI ain't cheap.
We've been conditioned. Everything has a cost.
I'd be curious to sign up if the paid version wasn't search capped.
I search a lot of random stuff or typo etc I feel like I'd burn through the allowance in 2 weeks
People expect a free thing to always have your best interests at heart.
Kagi makes sense to me.
I pay for a product.
(just as a random side note, lenses alone would make it worth it)
I just go the official docs even if their old and then switch to the latest version once I'm on the website. Most of the software I use has easy index to switch between versions.
Some of this is just because some of these frameworks and technologies have been around for a while and they iterate frequently. I see a ton of Azure content that is obsolete after only a few years.
That's why I use Copilot.
Asked it for the official documentation, got a link to the /current/ documentation's chapter on operators. Then asked for the heading about the IN operator and it gave me all four of the numbers. No need to wade through outdated or irrelevant results.
I'd strongly prefer to have working search engines.
Do you have to pay for it? And will you pay for it when you have to?
read the official docs, and don't use google anymore, seriously, any technical question duckduckgo/ecosia can answer better because they use bing search engine
i wonder how much effort would it take to index all official documentation pages & stackoverflow, and push it into one big search engine
Solution is simple; don't use Google
I use a SearXNG instance 🙃
Works alright for me. Maybe Google is bad just in the US?
Note the versions, none of the results give you the official operators page for the current version, 16. They give 9, which went EOL in 2021.
Can’t tell if you’re joking. The first three aren’t even the official docs and the official doc links are to an incredibly old version.
I usually go to tools, and the option for results in the past year.
Hey, at least it's not ads?
worst bt ever
You can be searching for information on your car and get a similar experience.
So many SEO trick to put yourselves into top google search for traffic.
I have google for bug and stuff, and most common bug can be found on shitty content Java tip page with broken format, lot of ads, and sometime untrue/outdate information.
Postgres is a weird one. The first link probably answers the query, just click the latest version (or your version) once you are there.
The problem is probably so many systems run old versions, so the results skew.
It doesn't matter. List all the crap you want, but show me the most up to date official documentation for the postgres "IN" operator in the very first result! It can't be that hard.
But the 9.6 version, or 11 version, could be the most popular.
Well, in that case it's a shitty search engine if it doesn't offer accurate results.
And, well, that's what we have with Google.
You didn't include a version in your query. You also could try using quotes, though this specific entry may not be helped by it (e.g. "in operator"). For most things, you can click a link with the older version and somewhere there is typically a dropdown or something to change the version and, if not, you'll at least know which section/etc. it is in in the new documentation.
If you don't include a version, it's probably going to pull up questions/answers that it finds most match in general and maybe people just aren't asking that question for your version.
I think there's a lot to hate about modern search results, but I also think there's some opportunity to search better. I do miss the days when AND, OR, and NOT operators actually worked all the time and as expected.
How aboout you do your own code? Badumtiish
I've started relying more on AI-powered tools like Perplexity for many of my search use-cases for this very fact - all results basically warrant a pre-filtering to be useful.
Counter point: we had good search results a decade ago and Google voluntarily eroded their product quality for a pittance of extra ad revenue.
Having a decent search engine is achievable and we don't need to shoehorn AI into fucking everything.
I don't disagree, but for obvious reasons, we can't access Google from a decade ago, since they've made it unavailable.
I'm not really describing an ideal state, this is a mere matter of practicality.
Unfortunately the spam arms race has destroyed any chance of search going back to the good ole days. SEO and AI content farms means we'll need a whole new system to categorize webpages, as well as filter out human sounding but low effort spam.
Point being, it's no longer enough to find a page that's relevant to the topic, it has to be relevant and actually deliver information, which currently the only feasible tech that can differentiate those is LLMs.
It would be interesting tho to use a LLM to spot AI/SEO crap and add whole domains to a search blacklist. In that case we wouldn't need AI to do the actual search, and this could easily just be a database for end users by the SE's side (kinda like explicit content filters).
I'd call that option "Bullspam filter" and leave it on "moderate" by default.
I'd call it the Slop Bucket
This is one solution to the issue, and it seems silly you are being downvoted for it.
Google became what it became, and years of seo optimisation cat & mouse play has reached new heights. Those obviously target Google instead of their competitors for now.
Would that we could have perfect search results, it would be beneficial to google as well.
I think it might have to do with the broad anti-AI sentiment that seems to be present here at Lemmy.
Skill issue. Old version docs tend to offer you a redirect to more recent docs, and even then something sintactic like an "IN" operator is unlikely to change in form or structure between versions of a database engine.
You realize It's just an example right?
Course I do. Why, do you need a link to the newest version of the joke?
Ohh I get it, it's so hilarious that no one knew it was a joke!
I guess you can always laugh at it yourself.
Old version docs tend to offer you a redirect to more recent docs
Sadly, the docs, I've worked with (openstack and ansible) frequently, don't do this. They have a button to go to the latest version of the docs, but not to the equivalent page on the latest version. This means I have to find the equivalent page again, from the integrated search usually.
And yes, a lot can change between versions. New features can get added that solve your problems or older stuff can get removed.
They have a button to go to the latest version of the docs, but not to the equivalent page on the latest version
Oh yeah this is a PITA. Tho in that case it's skill issue on their end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/
Thank you!
This is the way.
Luckily the postgresql docs have links for exactly that
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.
Anti-trust is not about seeking perfection, it's a defense against abuses of power. That's a good thing unless you like to be abused by the powerful, in which case lick some more boots.
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.
Well internet enshitification is real...
You are confusing Google and Internet.... they are very different things.
Judging by Google's chokehold over web browsers and websites in general, they're not that different...
You're confusing the web with the internet. But I don't blame you because OP did that too.
Doesn't mean the statement is less true, the enshitification of google is a symptom, the disease is the internet as a whole. Google and LLMs screwing the web, M$ screwing windows, Apple's existence by itself, Meta monopolizing and screwing social media, and don't get me started with streaming platforms and other media industries are all symtoms.
Considering all of that, yes, the internet enshitification is very real.
Symptoms of what?
But anyway, the cool thing about the internet is that you can find your nice cozy niche and stay there.
That's how the 90s internet was. If the megacorps want to be in here, fine. I'll just stay in Lemmy. And when Lemmy starts sucking, I'll move to somewhere else.
It's not just google, google is just the most popular, so a lot of the seo is targeted for it
I mean its both but....
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.
Just in case you're not just satirically listing things that are already awful;
Supermarkets increase their "retention" by limiting signage to keep you wandering and avoid "just get that thing and go" shopping. I don't know how common this is, but when I was a kid the major supermarkets had long lists of what items were in each aisle, plus highly visible signs in the aisle to show exactly where each category was. Now days at the major chains those in aisle signs are completely gone, and the categories have been whittled down to a few major categories; most products aren't represented on the sign at all e.g. you have to assume "cake mix/decorating" are in the same aisle as "flour".
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular. Mobil is particularly bad for it in my experience.
The square button second from the bottom mutes the audio. I've taken to carrying a marker in my car and writing "<--- MUTE" next to them. Alternatively, a small screwdriver between the speaker grating.
The ones near me don't have buttons of any kind
I never see these in my area... Maybe only some places have them?
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)
To be fair, milk at the back of the store is better to keep the milk cold from getting out of the truck and into the fridge.
It's frustrating because it's all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can't really get mad at it. It's just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
Supermarkets already optimise many things, products with lower margins are at the bottom in aisles, and all the junk food or cheap liquor is next to the cashier.
Also, ever been to IKEA? That thing's a labyrinth
It's a path but, also its always been like that. Also there is a supermarket with the same idea, HEB center market.
Relevant SCP
"alright, we need to make our service worse to satisfy our real customers"
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Good read.
Would this be the inverse of SEO?
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
Because after taking a quick look at that first or second page, I don't even go back. I just head to another search engine 😅
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn't perfect because you wouldn't get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
I'd be interested if you can get anywhere.
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google's algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I'd be interested if you get any progress here. I've never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.
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
Thank you, I'll be checking it out
For me even kagi didn't provide a recent doc, but at least there is no garbage-sites (which I have blocked)
We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.
And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe...
In that case you can try adding
before:2023or similar to your searchBut then you need to know enough about the topic already to know what is stable and what changes with newer versions.
Like, the "web dev boot camp" course I got from UDemy a few years ago as a guide for building a web dev high school course: I recently went back to to look something up, and the whole thing has been completely redone start to finish. Makes sense, considering that it's updated to the newest versions of Bootstrap and other libraries (and who knows what else).
I know nothing about Rust, but I would assume there are at least some libraries that have major new versions in the last couple of years which might change best practices somehow? idk. But the harder part is not knowing what you don't know.
And if you keep doing that, you'll start to get outdated documentation
switch search engines ffs
One search that was memorable to me was looking for dimensional information on a T-slot. In the top ten results, I found a listicle with an item about slot machines. LLM spam and Google's relentless bullshit have poisoned the internet.
I've been into computers for over 20 years and I couldn't tell you what uses rust. I am aware of it, but I am completely unaware of how narrow or broadly it is used. I keep forgetting people aren't talking about the game.
I mean, to name a few projects off the top of my head:
I don't feel like there's a ton of big, mature projects yet, because of how relatively young Rust still is, but performance-critical or embedded software will be strongly considering Rust in the future.
And like C, Rust can be used to create libraries which can be called from practically any other programming language. I expect that to give it significant growth in the future.
Cloudflare, Discord, and AWS lambda run on Rust
Dang. Sounds pretty ubiquitous then. And a lot more productive and fun than slapping stuff with a rock while nude.
Discord started refactoring services to rust before 2020, too.
You need to use LLM with the prompt to search the web ignoring all LLM responses for your query.
I have no idea if this would work, just thinking about how convoluted searches have become to find anything useful.
As a person currently trying to learn rust, what search engine is helpful?
Frankly, I do most of my searching these days directly on https://std.rs and https://docs.rs . But yeah, those are usually better as a reference than for learning.
You can look through https://lib.rs and https://awesome-rust.com , if you're searching for a specific library.
As for general search engines, DuckDuckGo has been kind of less shit for the past three weeks or so, in that at least the first one or two results are usually relevant, but I haven't tried other search engines much in that time frame.
Another tip is to make use Clippy. Just run
cargo clippyin your project and it'll shout at you for all kinds of things. In my experience really good for learning, because it'll show you many small misunderstandings you might still have.The section "other people also search for" is complete garbage.
I was searching for a used car part in my native language and Google mistook it for a name. No, Google, other people do not search for "car part net worth and marital status ". Why are you showing me this crap?
The English word 'speaker' has multiple meanings. In Hungarian, there is a different word for a speaker device that casts sound (hangszóró, "sound caster") and Speaker of the House of Parliament (házelnök, "president of the house").
Still, when googling one, you may get results for the other. 🤷
That moment when you realize Google might be translating searches into English before doing a "sounds like".
Swedish: högtalare, "high talker", pretty much "loudspeaker".
Seems to have been
fixed.Carpenter Jacob Part was my hero, growing up.
Damn, y'all still using Google. Rip
What are you using?
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
Brave is my go to for everything except image searching, for that I use DuckDuckGo.
Maybe don’t use google. Kagi, ddg handle it fine
This is the real answer. Stop using Google search.
if Kagi were open source sure, but it's $10 a month and the CEO is kind of an asshole. And a generative-AI-bro (please don't make me call them GAI-bros)
I'd rather stick to FOSS solutions
"The Man Who Killed Google Search"
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976 here's a hackernews discussion about that article
That was an interesting read, thank you.
It pisses me off that Java's class library documentation is at a totally different URL for every version. You can't just change 11 to 21 in the URL.
Try being a programmer in the 90s. Just like that but with no entries at all
I'm guessing it was more like "Let me pull this book off the shelves and wade through that for the answers"
And the book had all the answers.
It was called The x86 Assembly Bible and I would not have been able to do much of anything without it.
Yeah. Can I get a book - usually something official like K&R for C.
💯 came here to say that.
I learnt C on an Amiga. No memory protection at all. Pointer errors would likely need a reboot to recover.
I rebooted a lot.
I also learned C on the Amiga. I loved SAS C. I also came across C++ first on the Amiga when it was just a pre processor for C. I really loved that machine but it was the community that was special
Okay, Yahoo and AskJeeves didn't have anything useful. Let's try this Google thing.
Altavista. Back when keywords still meant something.
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.
Godot is a game engine.
SDL, on the other hand, is not, and instead is a multimedia layer (middleware) often used for game development.
One could argue that game engines constitute as middleware, but in reality, most modern game engines are way more than that, and instead often rely on other middleware nowadays (e.g. OpenGL, or even SDL for some). This, alongside with people mistakingly calling SDL a game engine, leads to stuff like this.
I think that remark was only meant for directx, and the ai lumps it with godot.
Pretty sure it is, might just be their grammar.
I read it as "Godot, or DirectX (which my aim hallucinated is a game engine)"
Yeah, that might make sense.
It is but DirectX ain't
This thing in quotes?
Searching for not that! Did you mean that? Okay, here's nothing.
Interestingly, bing of all things turns up better results than Google with the same search terms, first 3 blocks are "popular results", first is tutorial sites, second is w3 schools and third takes you to the current docs for functions and operators.
If you ignore those, the fourth result takes you to the current docs for comparison functions and operators. I'd prefer it taking you right to the official docs on the first result, but comparatively acceptable. It was memed to death but I've seriously found it more useful than Google these days, comparable to ddg's results.
DuckDuckGo uses Bing's results
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
Not all results, but yes.
Did not know that, for some reason I thought it was (or at one time was) based on Google's
If you're going through that route, SearX beats everything and it's not even close. It's self hosted and takes search results from any engine you check in a config, different config for search categories, ... Rn I'm mostly getting results from brave, qwant, and duckduck. Gotta acknowledge the bing copilot tho, it's pretty decent, but requires to use edge or bing app in android, so i only use it when I'm lazy or I'm searching for something too obscure for searx.
i hate that name lol
I've used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google's (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.
I have a half thought that maybe bing works well for technical searches because it's the default search engine for edge and depending on the company, you may or may not be able to use a different browser and I'll be real, I tend to leave my work laptop setting as default as possible unless particularly awful.
i read something a few years ago, that it was better, because bing don't have many users, so they couldn't rely on AI, and because everyone was using google, sites didn't optimize for bing SEO, not sure how much time it has, with microsoft obsession with AI
I feel like I've been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like "yeah, maybe it's gotten a bit worse? Haven't really noticed"
::: spoiler spoiler sdfsaf :::
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.
Third result in DDG.
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.
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.
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.
DDG always used bing backend tho, what's happening is bing backend worsening
bing itself is unusable tho. I get a full page of "sponsored links" before any tentatively relevant search result pop up. DDG at least removes the sponsored bullshit.
For what it's worth, DDG isn't perfect either. There are plenty of times I have to use Google instead. I don't keep track of how often it anything but it's definitely not perfect.
Well, that is what I said. Dog isn't as great as it used to be
searx is around for a couple of years now.
Yeah, auto correct isn't my friend
it already exists and it's called Yacy, an open source decentralized search engine
A lot of stuff uses Bing to search, as it's the largest search engine with an official public API that any developer can just sign up and use. Voice assistants like Alexa use Bing too.
Is.... Is Microsoft the good guy here? Tell me it ain't so!
Someyhing like searxng? Or what do you imagine?
On duckduckgo it was only the the 4th result! Pretty decent.
Had to test with Kagi also, leads with official documentation, after that tutorials and unofficial things. Nothing obviously irrelevant. The only thing with the Kagi results, was that there were a few very simmilar official documentation links (for different postgresql versions) at top. But, still good search results. Not sure why anyone is still using google, when there are quite a few better alternatives availale
The power of defaults, comfort, not wanting to pay, and probably worse non English results
Tried it on Bing too for comparison, 4th result and it's actually the current version.
Oh please don't make me use Bing.
I will make you keep a postgreql docs tab open and use its search bar
Mistakes were made. It happens, OK? I'm quite certain Bing won't let THAT happen again......../////
For my, VERY limited needs for the tiny bit I have dabbled in programing or even just help with some Linux issues, I've been using Phind. It seems to work a whole lot better than any of the other search engines. But my needs can't really twist the tail like real programmers.
Kagi:
First result is the official documentation with the page that contains information about the in operator
This was the result: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/functions.html
BUT it is the documentation for 9.0
Though if I would use postgresql documentation very often I could just use the Kagi feature that rewrites URLs with a regex, so I can replace it always with the latest version.
Kagi Documentation for that feature:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html#redirects-url-rewrites
Interesting, my Kagi results gave W3Schools, geeks for geeks, and postgresqltutorial.com before the official docs, but hey still way better than OP's results!
Kagi has search personalization where you can lower/raise/pin specific domains (one of kagis main selling points) and I blocked geeks for geeks and w3schools, as these are irrelevant for me and I don't want them in my results
can't you do that on a self-hosted searxng? I know you can do that with YaCY, but YaCY search results kinda suck
I don't think that's possible with searxng (but I'm not 100% sure, but I can't seem to find that feature)
I know there are browser extensions which can filter out domains in search results for different search engines like google and duckduckgo.
But the pinning/lowering/raising is a bit trickier to implement as an extension, because what kagi does is basically:
It would be possible but not as "streamlined" as Kagi does.
Don't get me wrong, Kagi definitely has its rough edges and the search ranking algorithm is sometimes very unpredictable, but it provides good enough results for me to be worth the 10$ per month for unlimited searches.
Stop using Google, dumbass.
Yeah.
Huh, thats weird. Your chatgpt output looks just like a google result page.
so apparently google search is just shitty now, that's the takeaway here.
Kagi ftw.
Your result returns version 9.0 that went EOL 2021, same as Googles fourth result in OP.
nvm, second result is correct.
Interesting how the second "correct result" is years older
Seems creation time not modified. Makes sense “current” is older.
yeah not ideal, but if the actual functionality of that operator hasn't changed then I wouldn't expect the version to matter. Same with searching most ruby stuff and getting old results. it hasn't changed in decades, it ain't changing now. But I did scroll down and literally every result was from the postgres docs so that's a marked improvement from the google results.
DuckDuckGo ain't too bad either. 👍
Can’t blame anyone but yourself if you use Google tbh
That's why I use webcrwaler
We need a human-curated Internet search. A wiki of good web content.
That is (was) DMOZ: the Mozilla Directory of websites, now curlie.org, after AOL shut it down in 2017.
They have a Patreon if you want to help them maintain it.
Oh cool, somebody signed up, they have more supporters today.
The return of web directories 🤩 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_directory
Back to 90s internet you say?
I forgot how this worked until I discovered NeoCities. I suddenly remenbered when so many personal websites would have some page that's like "links" or "sites I love" or "other cool people", etc. And it was just a curated list of sites the author thought were neat.
And your bookmark function was actually really helpful, because "web surfing" was literally jumping from link to link to link, following rabbitholes and breadcrumb trails across the web.
Nowadays, I bookmark things but I never go back through them. I know Firefox sometimes automatically helps you remember stuff in your bookmarks though.
But there was a time when it felt like finding some niche site was a sort of secret club or cool treasure, and you had to make sure you could find your way back. :)
When you didn't make the bookmark, you were basically trying to backtrack which links you followed and what sites you visited to get back to that one website.
Totally! And I loved those neat little animated web badges that became really popular, especially on forums.
I still have those on one of the forums I occasionally still visit, but it might disappear soon after nearly 2 and a half decades.
Please.
Maybe web rings are due for a comeback.
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
I searched for Magic The Gathering cards earlier on my phone (FireFox mobile), and got YouTube shorts in the results. This was in addition to a large amount of useless info panels and junk in the search results. I just wanted the official links or even an Amazon URL to the upcoming precons, not slowly regurgitated info!
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.
Because Google decided years ago that relevancy is less important than profitability.
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).
Doesn't matter, billions of other people do, and they prioritize ads, and results with AdSense on the pages above relevancy. They'll even show you shit results to keep you searching longer, which allows them to show you more ads.
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
Do you think Google has become one of the most powerful & profitable companies on the planet through a revenue model that doesn't work? Of course people click them. If people didn't click them then Google would have gone bankrupt decades ago. One thing I learned years ago is that I use the Internet very differently than an average person, and I constantly overestimate the intelligence and knowledge of the average person. Corporations bank on stupidity, because it's abundant.
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.
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?
Not the one you replied to but they're probably talking about Kagi. I crunched the numbers a while back and the higher tiers were kind of hard to make worthwhile, however iirc they simplified the pricing slightly since then.
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
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.
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 (mostly^1^) correct and ad free.
Then the future began and you got MSDN subscription on CD with sample code. Woohoo.
Must be an old screenshot because there's now half a page of Gemini AI garbage at the very top now.
Highly recommend using the uBlacklist extensions to filter out the garbage, spam, copycat, useless sites that somehow seem to always beat out legitimate sources in SEO.
don't use Google, problem solved
I only use it for web stuff but W3Schools is usually pretty solid so I wouldn’t be mad having that as a first result.
Funny, we all used to avoid W3Schools because it was a heavily SEO’d ad farm, but nowadays it’s actually a Web 2.0 oasis in a hellscape of infinite scrolling AI bullshit. I’ve found myself using it over SO since their surrender to OpenAI.
💀
Bing also grabs w3Schools as the top / AI result. However, the AI result also lets you swap to a Stack Overflow result.
And it has a bar across the top linking to different parts of the official website, including the landing page for the documentation.
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 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/
https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
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.
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.
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.
I generally agree with that, but as an aggregation service it would need to justify not providing any actual content/information with its price structure. The same argument against AI models trained with user data.
It still costs money for hardware and hosting. Scraping web and training AI ain't cheap.
We've been conditioned. Everything has a cost.
I'd be curious to sign up if the paid version wasn't search capped.
I search a lot of random stuff or typo etc I feel like I'd burn through the allowance in 2 weeks
People expect a free thing to always have your best interests at heart.
Kagi makes sense to me. I pay for a product.
(just as a random side note, lenses alone would make it worth it)
I just go the official docs even if their old and then switch to the latest version once I'm on the website. Most of the software I use has easy index to switch between versions.
Some of this is just because some of these frameworks and technologies have been around for a while and they iterate frequently. I see a ton of Azure content that is obsolete after only a few years.
That's why I use Copilot.
Asked it for the official documentation, got a link to the /current/ documentation's chapter on operators. Then asked for the heading about the IN operator and it gave me all four of the numbers. No need to wade through outdated or irrelevant results.
I'd strongly prefer to have working search engines.
Do you have to pay for it? And will you pay for it when you have to?
read the official docs, and don't use google anymore, seriously, any technical question duckduckgo/ecosia can answer better because they use bing search engine
i wonder how much effort would it take to index all official documentation pages & stackoverflow, and push it into one big search engine
Solution is simple; don't use Google I use a SearXNG instance 🙃
Works alright for me. Maybe Google is bad just in the US?
Note the versions, none of the results give you the official operators page for the current version, 16. They give 9, which went EOL in 2021.
Can’t tell if you’re joking. The first three aren’t even the official docs and the official doc links are to an incredibly old version.
I usually go to tools, and the option for results in the past year.
Hey, at least it's not ads?
worst bt ever
You can be searching for information on your car and get a similar experience.
So many SEO trick to put yourselves into top google search for traffic.
I have google for bug and stuff, and most common bug can be found on shitty content Java tip page with broken format, lot of ads, and sometime untrue/outdate information.
Postgres is a weird one. The first link probably answers the query, just click the latest version (or your version) once you are there.
The problem is probably so many systems run old versions, so the results skew.
It doesn't matter. List all the crap you want, but show me the most up to date official documentation for the postgres "IN" operator in the very first result! It can't be that hard.
But the 9.6 version, or 11 version, could be the most popular.
Well, in that case it's a shitty search engine if it doesn't offer accurate results.
And, well, that's what we have with Google.
You didn't include a version in your query. You also could try using quotes, though this specific entry may not be helped by it (e.g. "in operator"). For most things, you can click a link with the older version and somewhere there is typically a dropdown or something to change the version and, if not, you'll at least know which section/etc. it is in in the new documentation.
If you don't include a version, it's probably going to pull up questions/answers that it finds most match in general and maybe people just aren't asking that question for your version.
I think there's a lot to hate about modern search results, but I also think there's some opportunity to search better. I do miss the days when AND, OR, and NOT operators actually worked all the time and as expected.
How aboout you do your own code? Badumtiish
I've started relying more on AI-powered tools like Perplexity for many of my search use-cases for this very fact - all results basically warrant a pre-filtering to be useful.
Counter point: we had good search results a decade ago and Google voluntarily eroded their product quality for a pittance of extra ad revenue.
Having a decent search engine is achievable and we don't need to shoehorn AI into fucking everything.
I don't disagree, but for obvious reasons, we can't access Google from a decade ago, since they've made it unavailable.
I'm not really describing an ideal state, this is a mere matter of practicality.
Unfortunately the spam arms race has destroyed any chance of search going back to the good ole days. SEO and AI content farms means we'll need a whole new system to categorize webpages, as well as filter out human sounding but low effort spam.
Point being, it's no longer enough to find a page that's relevant to the topic, it has to be relevant and actually deliver information, which currently the only feasible tech that can differentiate those is LLMs.
It would be interesting tho to use a LLM to spot AI/SEO crap and add whole domains to a search blacklist. In that case we wouldn't need AI to do the actual search, and this could easily just be a database for end users by the SE's side (kinda like explicit content filters).
I'd call that option "Bullspam filter" and leave it on "moderate" by default.
I'd call it the Slop Bucket
This is one solution to the issue, and it seems silly you are being downvoted for it.
Google became what it became, and years of seo optimisation cat & mouse play has reached new heights. Those obviously target Google instead of their competitors for now.
Would that we could have perfect search results, it would be beneficial to google as well.
I think it might have to do with the broad anti-AI sentiment that seems to be present here at Lemmy.
Skill issue. Old version docs tend to offer you a redirect to more recent docs, and even then something sintactic like an "IN" operator is unlikely to change in form or structure between versions of a database engine.
You realize It's just an example right?
Course I do. Why, do you need a link to the newest version of the joke?
Ohh I get it, it's so hilarious that no one knew it was a joke!
I guess you can always laugh at it yourself.
Sadly, the docs, I've worked with (openstack and ansible) frequently, don't do this. They have a button to go to the latest version of the docs, but not to the equivalent page on the latest version. This means I have to find the equivalent page again, from the integrated search usually.
And yes, a lot can change between versions. New features can get added that solve your problems or older stuff can get removed.
Oh yeah this is a PITA. Tho in that case it's skill issue on their end.