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.
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...
"The Man Who Killed Google Search"
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.
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!"
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.
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"
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.
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.
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
Some use cases of redirects include:
- 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
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.
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!
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
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 (mostly1) 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.
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.
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
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.
Hey, at least it's not ads?
worst bt ever
I usually go to tools, and the option for results in the past year.
Solution is simple; don't use Google I use a SearXNG instance 🙃
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.
2020 has become the decade of reading books. Search results these days are so bad.
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
