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The Verge shows how Google search is useless (www.theverge.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Verge published this spam article about the "best printers of 2024" to demonstrate how terrible Google's search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search "best printer" on Google.

I love a good, informative troll.

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[–] [email protected] 424 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (44 children)

In my recent experience, it recommends shitty blogs loaded with adverts and keywords. Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites. My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.

That aside, my Brother laser printer is still working great. No complaints.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.

Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google's quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don't get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago

And super specific queries?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For me it’s programming issues. I guess devs know that doing SEO would shoot themselves in the foot.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Could you elaborate? You’re saying you’re going to google for programming issues, but at the same time devs don’t do SEO?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sure. What I mean is that when I search for issues in duck duck go, I don’t see relevant results. But then I put “!g” and what I want (usually stack overflow or GitHub) comes to the top.

So it makes sense that programming sites do tags and keywords properly to optimize things for the user instead of trying promote their site no matter what.

At least that’s my guess anyway.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Stack overflow has been one of the consistently reliable googleable sites for decades.

It’s a shame Quora has strayed so far from their initial cloning of SO’s site. It seems to be turning into AskYahoo 2 fast from the results I’ve seen lately.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Yup. I constantly found myself appending !g for important queries that I needed an answer for right then and now. Google has stopped providing that commodity. It's almost never worth it anymore to fall back to Google.

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