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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Somebody mentioned something about a thing in outer space called a dark star. It sounded interesting so I googled it and got millions of links about a Grateful Dead tribute band called the Dark Star Orchestra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing ads for that for months. 😂 ChatGPT gave me a nice summary but of course I didn’t have any way of knowing whose work I was reading.
Or even if it was accurate.
The future seemed so much more promising when I was a teenager. Now I'm mid 30s and the present is very.... corporate and lame. Very lame. They've even programmed the younger generation to be sanitized and accepting of blandness. Imagine growing up with only one or two genuinely creative movies being released a year. Zoomers don't even have their own music genre, it's all just nostalgia. Sigh.
Googling "dark star astronomy" comes up with plenty of info on it.
Knowing how to do what you did is vital for using a search engine effectively. It's not possible for a search engine to know what you want when a word has multiple meanings (well, not yet, anyway). It could have just as easily have been the other way around, where OP wanted to search for a niche band but all they could find is astronomy things.
Adding context like "band", "astronomy", etc is important if you're googling anything non trivial. Sometimes you even need to identify different words to search. Eg, there's a programming language called Go. But "go" is such a generic word that it's hard to search for. Searching for "golang" tends to help a lot.
It's rather tragic that a tribute band called Dark Star gets priority over a scientific Dark Star. I don't know if it's because more people search for the band or because this search engine is trying to sell you albums by this band...
To be fair, the band puts a lot of effort into marketing and keyword targeting, and scientific teams researching dark stars only publish for specific spaces towards other scientific people that are already looking at those places.
I don't mind it. I just think we all should value scientific research into astronomy, no matter the volume of interest, more than marketing strategies for a product, be it art or not. I might be wrong tho...
Did you use any search operators, like quotes or minus signs to get rid of the clutter?
A lot of the time those don't even work anymore. ~Cherri
I totally agree with you, but googling 'dark star space' or 'dark star science' you get what you're looking for.