611
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
611 points (96.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35868 readers
389 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
for many years now – stopped using them back when they started to ignore +include, -exclude, and "phrases"
It was a necessary move to incorporate support for Google+ profiles. /s
So wait, the search operators don't work anymore? It seemed like it but is that confirmed?
They still work as intended actually, but most pages are so inundated with SEO garble that they’re effectively useless
And if it limits the results too much they just ignore them to cram more ads in.
Can’t have the bottom of the page spelling gogle.
They really don't, though. Inclusion/exclusion operators work most of the time, but it'll still return results with explicitly-excluded keywords. It also fucks up results by returning entries with similar words to your query, even when you double-quote a part of the search term. Advanced queries that use booleans and logical AND/OR don't work at all anymore, that functionality has been completely removed. It returns what it thinks you want, not what you actually want, even when explicitly crafting a query to be as specific as possible.
I use Kagi for search now and it's 1000x better, especially when researching technical issues; it's like when Google actually respected your search terms and query as a whole.
To be clear, we’re talking about the actual search results themselves and not labelled advertisements or any of google’s godawful widgets that take up half the first page?
Do you have an example of a search that returns excluded keywords?
Not trying to be confrontational lol I’m genuinely curious. There was an article I think last year where they demonstrated that everything was still working, but pages essentially just embedded thousands of keywords which effectively ruined the system
They still work but they search the entire page, not just what's visible in your browser. A search for
"term"does not implicate you being able to findtermon the results' rendered pages.So pages are just including every relevant term hidden somewhere like they making resumes in the early aughts with 4pt white text with bullshit at the bottom?
A popular SEO trick around 15 years ago was to put a bunch of search terms in a heading tag near the top of your page markup and just style it to minimize its appearance, because if you completely hid it google would penalize your pagerank score. They test for visibility but it's difficult to do so in a foolproof and futureproof way so there's likely a similar technique still seeing some limited use today.
It's far less effective or straightforward than the modern prevailing SEO strategy; which is using generative AI that have been trained on all the top-ranked pages to produce exactly what google likes and ranks highly. Which has a knock-on effect of causing all these AIs to start eating themselves by training on pages produced by AI, like a kind of human-centipede ouroboros.
I think you can still use the operators if you select "verbatim" under "search tools." On mobile, you need to scroll to the right past images/videos/news/etc
Same.
Google is crap now.