11 ms·

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet search

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. (I've pretested that query, and turns out that there are melting houses all over the world, just gotta look in your neighborhood) so to the point here, I lament that Google doesn't work any more, but she doesn't, she thinks it works great. Now if I can just get her to stop finding restaurant recommendations on TikTok...

wildrhythms 3y ago
How would you have phrased that query?
- fsckboy 3y ago
  unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive" so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query" it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does. I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    There is a difference here that you saw the house and she didn't and trusted your interpretation of it being melting which you didn't think to trust perhaps. You may not have considered that everyone else would also think it is melting, but as an outsider she was in a better position of judgment.
    - recursivecaveat 3y ago
      I think it comes from an attitude about a different era of the internet as well. When I was young, I would expect most of the information about say a particularly weird house comes from the website of the owner of the house, or maybe a blogger who is into local architecture, if its on the internet at all. In that context it makes sense to try to query with what you think the owner would self-describe as (so like find out what the proper name of the style is, then query with that). If you come from an era where most of the stuff on the internet is people talking about or sharing the minority of original content, it makes more sense to query using terms that the casual viewer of the house would use.
Raidion 3y ago
I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites. Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.
- userinanother 3y ago
  Information search works a lot better because it has no commercial value. Therefore no SEO attack
  - alvah 3y ago
    That's not correct. When programs such as Amazon Affiliates cut their commissions a few years ago, many SEOs pivoted to info content monetized by display ads. The $ per page view is less, but it was still wildly profitable, at least until the most recent Google update frenzy.
- darkerside 3y ago
  Odd, I find Quora and WebMD to have some of the more useful information out there.
- pault 3y ago
  Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.
  - sharkweek 3y ago
    This happened with the World of Warcraft subreddit. Any topic someone posted about, a gaming site was having ChatGPT (or whatever) write an article talking about how players were talking about X/Y/Z topic. Well... the subreddit caught on, and started trolling the shit out of the site by making up fake things "fans were excited about." https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-into-covering-a-fake-wow-feature-145006066.html https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-...
AniseAbyss 3y ago
I always like to talk about how much I hate advertising but when I need a Thai restaurant Google Maps has my back. But I'm also old and remember that the yellow pages used to bring in billions of revenue. Have things really changed on a fundamental level?
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  Is that "advertising" though? Google Maps is an index: you enter a query, like "Thai restaurant near $location", and it shows you Thai restaurants in that location. Then, you can look at some of those restaurants' listings and see photos (usually uploaded by customers, but some from the business), pictures of menus (same), opening hours, a link to their website, etc. I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money. I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?
- genewitch 3y ago
  When i'm in my car, the only thing i use google maps for is "yellow pages" - get me the phone number, and about 20% of the time, the hours of operation. In fact, when i am at home, and i need a phone number, i go to google maps. But i do use the maps as maps when i am not in my car.
hiddencost 3y ago
Try Eater.
pclmulqdq 3y ago
The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works. The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  It all comes back to that "marginal user" blog post
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Chilko 3y ago
  Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.
  - Lolaccount 3y ago
    You mean, like how we interact with ChatGPT? ;-)
- wslh 3y ago
  Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource. I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1]. I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples. Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449
okdood64 3y ago
A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    The majority is often totally wrong and disinformed so being out of touch doesn't have to be a bad thing at all.
  - yard2010 3y ago
    A lot of HNers are pretty
    - twirlip 3y ago
      Oh, you!
      - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        HN is now Reddit, circa 2012.
        fsckboy 3y ago
        ah, the old "everything is a reddit clone-a-roo", hold my beer, I'm going in!
- antod 3y ago
  Is it wrong to want to be even further out of touch?
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
devin 3y ago
Username is fsckboy. > I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. Checks out.
- ssgh 3y ago
  "fsck - check and repair a Linux file system" (https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck) The -b -o -y must be undocumented flags.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    I was going to be fsckboi but was afraid I'd lose half my audience
  - devin 3y ago
    I’m aware. I thought it was funny.
wkat4242 3y ago
Hmm yes but that melting house is not something a SEO buyer would pay for. The problem is Google monetizes search terms and thus show the highest bidders and not the most relevant results. This manifests itself the most for things people want to sell (products or services)
Waterluvian 3y ago
The problem I have is that I need a way to just get webpage results. I did a search on my phone for “what’s the best colossal sword in Elden ring?” just now and I got: - full screen of those “intelligent” answers that is just naming swords from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3. - two SEO spam sites - two decent results - a full page of YouTube suggestions - two more SEO pages - a section of “people also searched for” - four more YouTube videos - another “people also searched for” - a block for Reddit posts discussion this question (finally what I really kind of wanted, maybe I just stop using Google…) - about 10+ more decent-looking websites. Perhaps your assistant is just paid enough not to be annoyed by this garbage way of getting to the answer. And perhaps she doesn’t know what great really feels like. I wonder if there’s a generation of people who only know of the Internet as being this bazaar that’s absolutely glowing with neon ads like some blade runner undercity.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  My results from the same query are related to yours but substantively different. Top result: article from GameRant on the best colossal weapons (I have no idea what this means) 6 "intelligent" answers, the first of which when expanded lists the "Elden Ring: All 11 Colossal Swords, Ranked By Physical Strength" Article from The Gamer called "Elden Ring: 14 Best Colossal Swords, Ranked" 4 YT videos Reddit block ....
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 3y ago
I don't think it's a question of levels of formality in your search terms, I think whether you find Google useful depends on what topics you typically search for. Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent. If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  > Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    It works some of the time for me, but there are frequently cases where I put the word in quotes and Google just pretends I didn't. It can be really egregious, too: I've searched for `foo` and had it say `Showing results for bar. Search for "foo" instead?` Then I follow the link that it provided and it still is searching for `bar` with the same prompt to refine the search, even though the double quotes are clearly still present.
    - Tanoc 3y ago
      I can concur. Just yesterday I was searching for something specific and thought I was sleep deprived or just generally losing awareness because I could swear I typed a very specific name in, only for it to show up in Google's search results (not the search bar) missing the last letter with no "Did you mean ---?" or "Searching for ---. Look only for |||?". I tried it again, and it did the same thing. I switched from Google to Google Image Search and watched it in real time delete that last letter from the search bar where I'd typed the term in. I went to show an acquaintance immediately after, only for the behaviour not to repeat itself. It made me feel like I was going crazy.
noizejoy 3y ago
The revolution devoured its children: In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic. The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind. Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream. Maybe some of these links will help? ;-) https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenager https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenage...
golergka 3y ago
I don't google as much, but I regular develop my random thoughts like that with ChatGPT. If I heard about your melting house, I'd try to generate it's picture with Dalle.
yieldcrv 3y ago
Google predicts too much about local things, in that case it works extremely well in that example, it was in your neighborhood google biased the results to something local and that worked specifically for her and that scenario This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models
rmbyrro 3y ago
I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc. I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users. We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!
- LambdaComplex 3y ago
  > I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc. Those still work, don't they? I use site: all the time.
  - CapricornNoble 3y ago
    Yeah, "site:" still works. I use "site:reddit.com/r/edh $cardname" any time I want to research Magic the Gathering combos. It also works far better than the same search string in DDG/Brave/Bing.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      There should be an inverse, "nosite:" selector, to avoid results from a site.
      - krackers 3y ago
        negation works with site operator
      - rmbyrro 3y ago
        You can use -site: to negate it. Pretty neat
      - LambdaComplex 3y ago
        Yep, negation does work. Do -site: rather than site:
NikolaNovak 3y ago
That's the thing. All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :) I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-). (There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)
- Arkhaine_kupo 3y ago
  > He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-). Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits. If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work". Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.
dicriseg 3y ago
I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as: You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad. So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.
coldtea 3y ago
>While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down. So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween <city>". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on. Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?
switch007 3y ago
Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but for me the poignant part is that she stopped engaging with you and reached for the phone, mid conversation. I've noticed this too. And before they even reach for their phone, it's as if you've lost them already, because they're thinking of searching and which app/keywords to use etc. It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone
landmass 3y ago
DuckDuckGo also suffered from the SEO infection, but recently - the last week or so, perhaps - it has improved. SEO probably still controls it, but when I put in "-Amazon" it does not present Amazon findings - remarkable! I'm also seeing a significant number of "no result" results. It isn't perfect but it's much better than six months ago.
huytersd 3y ago
You’re old? Your other comments have you railing on “normies”. Not to mention your username…

wildrhythms 3y ago

How would you have phrased that query?

fsckboy 3y ago
unlike some of the houses that show up in that query, this house was not designed to appear melting, and I wasn't sure if it was even designed to look uneven, or had the foundation settled and they did nothing about it? So I was trying to explain the uneven wavy lines, rounded corners, and I was saying "it's almost as if it had melted", thinking "this is my personal interpretation, I'm just being descriptive" so that's what I mean by "informal thinking" vs "explicit query" it's also easy to explain this one case, but it is true in general, she just finds things much more quickly than I do, and when I ask her what was her query I'm always "why tf did you type that in?" If we used a formal language for search, I'd beat her, but she throws in a lot of extraneous terms that make me think either or both "you are overspecifying" or "you are ambiguating" with those extra terms, but she gets answers I don't get, I think because many other people are typing things in the way she does. I had been trying to find it before I saw her, and since I knew the general neighborhood I was actually trying to "walk" around with streetview to find it, then I was wracking my brain for architectural terms I could use.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  There is a difference here that you saw the house and she didn't and trusted your interpretation of it being melting which you didn't think to trust perhaps. You may not have considered that everyone else would also think it is melting, but as an outsider she was in a better position of judgment.
  - recursivecaveat 3y ago
    I think it comes from an attitude about a different era of the internet as well. When I was young, I would expect most of the information about say a particularly weird house comes from the website of the owner of the house, or maybe a blogger who is into local architecture, if its on the internet at all. In that context it makes sense to try to query with what you think the owner would self-describe as (so like find out what the proper name of the style is, then query with that). If you come from an era where most of the stuff on the internet is people talking about or sharing the minority of original content, it makes more sense to query using terms that the casual viewer of the house would use.

Raidion 3y ago

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites. Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

userinanother 3y ago
Information search works a lot better because it has no commercial value. Therefore no SEO attack
- alvah 3y ago
  That's not correct. When programs such as Amazon Affiliates cut their commissions a few years ago, many SEOs pivoted to info content monetized by display ads. The $ per page view is less, but it was still wildly profitable, at least until the most recent Google update frenzy.
darkerside 3y ago
Odd, I find Quora and WebMD to have some of the more useful information out there.
pault 3y ago
Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.
- sharkweek 3y ago
  This happened with the World of Warcraft subreddit. Any topic someone posted about, a gaming site was having ChatGPT (or whatever) write an article talking about how players were talking about X/Y/Z topic. Well... the subreddit caught on, and started trolling the shit out of the site by making up fake things "fans were excited about." https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-into-covering-a-fake-wow-feature-145006066.html https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-...

AniseAbyss 3y ago

I always like to talk about how much I hate advertising but when I need a Thai restaurant Google Maps has my back. But I'm also old and remember that the yellow pages used to bring in billions of revenue. Have things really changed on a fundamental level?

shiroiuma 3y ago
Is that "advertising" though? Google Maps is an index: you enter a query, like "Thai restaurant near $location", and it shows you Thai restaurants in that location. Then, you can look at some of those restaurants' listings and see photos (usually uploaded by customers, but some from the business), pictures of menus (same), opening hours, a link to their website, etc. I don't see how any of that qualifies as "advertising"; it's just a business directory. It certainly isn't "unsolicited advertising". The same goes for the old Yellow Pages: it was a business directory (though it had ads too). Businesses had to pay to be listed in it, but that's the cost of doing business: if people can't find you, you're not going to make any money. I think when people say they hate advertising, what they really mean is unsolicited ads. If you're looking for a particular business, why wouldn't you want some info about them, or about the choices available?
genewitch 3y ago
When i'm in my car, the only thing i use google maps for is "yellow pages" - get me the phone number, and about 20% of the time, the hours of operation. In fact, when i am at home, and i need a phone number, i go to google maps. But i do use the maps as maps when i am not in my car.

hiddencost 3y ago

Try Eater.

pclmulqdq 3y ago

The trick is that Google actually works great. It works better than before. It just doesn't work in the way that we (highly educated and technical people) want. We all laughed at our parents and grandparents for typing full sentence questions into the search bar in 2005 instead of carefully crafted incantations with keywords, "site:" labels and other such things. Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works. The google we grew up with was a tool that allowed you to precisely retrieve authoritative writings related to a subject, but today's google is a lot more like ChatGPT than that.

sneed_chucker 3y ago
It all comes back to that "marginal user" blog post
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Chilko 3y ago
Indeed, I've had to force myself to start searching in full sentences much more as the results from the old method of keyword searching have steadily deteriorated.
- Lolaccount 3y ago
  You mean, like how we interact with ChatGPT? ;-)
wslh 3y ago
Google does not work. I can show you with a simple example with a few keywords together that does not find the specific resource. I just give an example in another HN thread on a different context [1]. I am open for a 30' session showing a lot more examples. Regarding less experienced people searching for information, try looking for health data and see what is in the top. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37961449

okdood64 3y ago

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.

ShamelessC 3y ago
A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  The majority is often totally wrong and disinformed so being out of touch doesn't have to be a bad thing at all.
- yard2010 3y ago
  A lot of HNers are pretty
  - twirlip 3y ago
    Oh, you!
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      HN is now Reddit, circa 2012.
      - fsckboy 3y ago
        ah, the old "everything is a reddit clone-a-roo", hold my beer, I'm going in!
antod 3y ago
Is it wrong to want to be even further out of touch?
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago

devin 3y ago

Username is fsckboy. > I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. Checks out.

ssgh 3y ago
"fsck - check and repair a Linux file system" (https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck) The -b -o -y must be undocumented flags.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  I was going to be fsckboi but was afraid I'd lose half my audience
- devin 3y ago
  I’m aware. I thought it was funny.

wkat4242 3y ago

Hmm yes but that melting house is not something a SEO buyer would pay for. The problem is Google monetizes search terms and thus show the highest bidders and not the most relevant results. This manifests itself the most for things people want to sell (products or services)

Waterluvian 3y ago

The problem I have is that I need a way to just get webpage results. I did a search on my phone for “what’s the best colossal sword in Elden ring?” just now and I got: - full screen of those “intelligent” answers that is just naming swords from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3. - two SEO spam sites - two decent results - a full page of YouTube suggestions - two more SEO pages - a section of “people also searched for” - four more YouTube videos - another “people also searched for” - a block for Reddit posts discussion this question (finally what I really kind of wanted, maybe I just stop using Google…) - about 10+ more decent-looking websites. Perhaps your assistant is just paid enough not to be annoyed by this garbage way of getting to the answer. And perhaps she doesn’t know what great really feels like. I wonder if there’s a generation of people who only know of the Internet as being this bazaar that’s absolutely glowing with neon ads like some blade runner undercity.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
My results from the same query are related to yours but substantively different. Top result: article from GameRant on the best colossal weapons (I have no idea what this means) 6 "intelligent" answers, the first of which when expanded lists the "Elden Ring: All 11 Colossal Swords, Ranked By Physical Strength" Article from The Gamer called "Elden Ring: 14 Best Colossal Swords, Ranked" 4 YT videos Reddit block ....

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lolinder 3y ago

I don't think it's a question of levels of formality in your search terms, I think whether you find Google useful depends on what topics you typically search for. Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent. If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.
- lolinder 3y ago
  It works some of the time for me, but there are frequently cases where I put the word in quotes and Google just pretends I didn't. It can be really egregious, too: I've searched for `foo` and had it say `Showing results for bar. Search for "foo" instead?` Then I follow the link that it provided and it still is searching for `bar` with the same prompt to refine the search, even though the double quotes are clearly still present.
  - Tanoc 3y ago
    I can concur. Just yesterday I was searching for something specific and thought I was sleep deprived or just generally losing awareness because I could swear I typed a very specific name in, only for it to show up in Google's search results (not the search bar) missing the last letter with no "Did you mean ---?" or "Searching for ---. Look only for |||?". I tried it again, and it did the same thing. I switched from Google to Google Image Search and watched it in real time delete that last letter from the search bar where I'd typed the term in. I went to show an acquaintance immediately after, only for the behaviour not to repeat itself. It made me feel like I was going crazy.

noizejoy 3y ago

The revolution devoured its children: In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic. The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind. Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream. Maybe some of these links will help? ;-) https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenager https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenage...

golergka 3y ago

I don't google as much, but I regular develop my random thoughts like that with ChatGPT. If I heard about your melting house, I'd try to generate it's picture with Dalle.

yieldcrv 3y ago

Google predicts too much about local things, in that case it works extremely well in that example, it was in your neighborhood google biased the results to something local and that worked specifically for her and that scenario This works for most people most of the time and is exactly what we’re finding frustrating But knowing what you can still use it for is 90% of the battle, my latest common use case is just fact checking AI right now but my primary queries are all to sandboxed language models

rmbyrro 3y ago

I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc. I'm thinking when our carefully curated prompts, chain-of-thoughts, and what else will stop working on ChatGPT because they optimized it for the technically uneducated users. We'll meet here again. Missing the days of "Let's think step-by-step". Ah, this one in particular seems to be already over!

LambdaComplex 3y ago
> I miss the days of "site:", "intitle:", etc. Those still work, don't they? I use site: all the time.
- CapricornNoble 3y ago
  Yeah, "site:" still works. I use "site:reddit.com/r/edh $cardname" any time I want to research Magic the Gathering combos. It also works far better than the same search string in DDG/Brave/Bing.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    There should be an inverse, "nosite:" selector, to avoid results from a site.
    - krackers 3y ago
      negation works with site operator
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      You can use -site: to negate it. Pretty neat
    - LambdaComplex 3y ago
      Yep, negation does work. Do -site: rather than site:

NikolaNovak 3y ago

That's the thing. All the people I feel are "using Google wrong" and are just "fluking the right results by accident "... They're actually using it more efficiently than I am! Same with almost everything mobile. I like the control and certainty and size and detail of desktop computing and my ergonomic keyboard and 32" monitors. I cannot understand how people are using wonky apps and Imprecise directions and half-understood usage... And getting many things faster and easier than I would :) I had an enlightment moment last night. I usd to run a photography studio so am pretty handy around a digital camera. I was setting up my phone's main camera with long shutter and trying to steady it to take a photo of a Halloween costume in the dark... When my friend just turned the phone to selfie camera, it automatically used it's screen as 6" flash, and he got a better photo faster and with less thought and kerfuffle. Was he "using it wrong", with lower res camera and single point direct flash (big no no!) and just not thinking it through at all? Maybe? No... He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-). (There are still times and areas where understanding the how and why is useful. But in many mundane daily tasks I'll get beat by people who don't bother :)

Arkhaine_kupo 3y ago
> He got a great result quickly and efficiently, I'm just stuck in stone age :-). Knowing how to use a camera is not being stuck in the stone age. His photo was good because the phone automatically had a longer shutter time, did post processing HDR and did light light edits. If you both set up RAW images on your phone, and put it on lightroom, yours will be editable into a perfect photo, his will be a mess of flash and AI generated artifacts by the phone to make it "just work". Having things that "just work" is great for everyday tasks, but power users and technical people should still have their tools to do things right. Apple allows for RAW image and videofootage while still having many settings by default for most people. Spotify used to have a ton of cool audiophile options in the settings now its like 3 options and they are all terrible. Google has gone that same way, instead of enabling both, they have cut off power users by focusing everything on "everyday use" which makes their product largely useless outside of some scenarios.

dicriseg 3y ago

I’m in my 40s so Google wasn’t my first search engine but it’s definitely been what I’ve used the most. And I do think it has changed similar how to you describe it. But I see the change more as: You used to go to Google and effectively be asking, “Google, find me information about X.” Today you’re implicitly asking, “Google, show me ads related to X.” You just kind of accept that what it shows you will be the thing that is most fine tuned to appear most related to X - and the most common reason to do that fine tuning in the first place is to deliver an ad. So you gotta search in natural language like an ad, and hope that someone in that first page of results decided to SEO some particularly good content so they could get you there to look at more ads.

coldtea 3y ago

>While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had said the house looked like it was melting, so she typed in "melting house", I think. Not that that's genius or quirky or anything, but I would never dream of typing in something I was thinking "informally", and her approach is more like "whatever whackadoo thing I'm thinking, probably other people think just like me" and she finds anything I ask her about. I've been doing that "informal" since Google existed - surely it's quite common. You describe what you want in fuzzy terms, and add more qualifiers to narrow it down. So, "melting house halloween" would be my first search, or rather "melting house halloween <city>". Similarly if I wanted to search for say Eugene Levy and didn't remember his name, I'd write something "comedian big eyebrows" (he's the second match after Groucho) or "big eyebrows american pie" (first match), and so on. Out of curiosity, how would you search for that house?

switch007 3y ago

Maybe I'm reading too much in to it, but for me the poignant part is that she stopped engaging with you and reached for the phone, mid conversation. I've noticed this too. And before they even reach for their phone, it's as if you've lost them already, because they're thinking of searching and which app/keywords to use etc. It's like their trust of the Internet is 100x higher than someone recounting something they've seen with their own eyes, and the value of knowing a bit of information or getting a dopamine hit is way way higher than having an engaging conversation with someone

landmass 3y ago

DuckDuckGo also suffered from the SEO infection, but recently - the last week or so, perhaps - it has improved. SEO probably still controls it, but when I put in "-Amazon" it does not present Amazon findings - remarkable! I'm also seeing a significant number of "no result" results. It isn't perfect but it's much better than six months ago.

huytersd 3y ago

You’re old? Your other comments have you railing on “normies”. Not to mention your username…