4 ms·
I would say any topic that isn't covered by stack overflow tends to start bleeding badly. Now that GitHub has prevented searching source I am having less succes
by xemdetia 2y ago
I would say any topic that isn't covered by stack overflow tends to start bleeding badly. Now that GitHub has prevented searching source I am having less success searching for error messages, as I used to be able to extract the static string and land in source. For go specifically how many times are you landing on search results that aren't gotour, stack overflow, and go docs? If stack overflow was not so gracefully indexable things would fall apart pretty quick and in lots of areas it does.
I would say searching for businesses outside major metro areas has gotten increasingly bad. I had a situation in the last few months that a business would only appear when they were open (barbershop) but if they were off that day they were not even on page 3.
Finding materials suppliers local to you has been a nightmare, I've been resorting to Yahoo-grade business directories to actually find businesses. These are places where Google has them on their maps but they never return in search unless I force my location to be away from home. Historically I never had to do this kind of manipulation.
I am having better luck driving around or hand scrolling around maps to find places then I am with search at times. It feels like after the first ten results Google completely gives up. E.g. I look for lumber yards and I get 20 ace hardwares and maybe two of them are actually lumber yards, but it completely misses some local sawmills that are specialized and amazing
I am whiffing Chinese restaurant near this town, state. I know the place is there but I cant remember the name, I can find it manually on the map.
- gregjor 2y agoI have a vague understanding of how Google search works, so I set my expectations accordingly. I probably don't want to get dumped into source code when looking up error messages, I want to find posts by other people who got the same error and see how they fixed it. I don't expect small businesses to have web sites or SEO or to do anything to promote their business online, so I'm not surprised when a local sawmill or barbershop or mom 'n' pop restaurant doesn't show up -- how would Google know about such places if they don't have web sites, reviews, incoming links? I have seen plenty of ads and SEO abuse and had to wade through W3Schools and TutorialPoint junk links looking up programming questions. I know how to focus my search on specific domains and how to exclude domains when I need to drill down. The examples you give seem like holes in Google's index that have probably always been that way, not a new shortcoming, though I don't know for sure because I haven't keept close track. I've started to use DDG more often because Google started using "AI" for search, and I have no interest in that, I usually know what I want to find and don't need LLMs auto-completing and hallucinating results for me.