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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I always bookmark sites I know I will use frequently. I didn't realize people didn't do that anymore lol
What happened to the search engines? They always seem to work fine for me
I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.
My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.
Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.
For much of the internet, optimization used to mean improving usefulness and usability for end users. Now that we (as a society as well as individually) can't go without the internet anymore, optimization means improving usefulness for shareholders and/or advertisers, to the detriment of the user. This doesn't matter to them anymore though, since giving up on search engines, social media etc just isn't an option for users anymore.
It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.
My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.
Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.
As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.
What do you consider advanced googling?
“Advanced” Site:google.com filetype:pdf -“consider” etc etc.
Using targeted operators to refine your search.
Plenty of resources on it by searching “Google operators”
Well yes, but also just any use of https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Oh wow, they made it easier and people still didn’t use it
That's been there for decades. We were taught to use it in middle school (~2003 for me). There used to be a fairly prominent link to the advanced search page from the main Google homepage.
For a while, regular google searches were good enough to find everything you needed, so the skill became less common/important. My guess is that public knowledge of it has just atrophied over time.
https://www.google.com/advanced_search
But also just anything from this page:
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?p=adv_operators&hl=en&rd=1
AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.
The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.