this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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What are y'all searching for that Google search isn't working for you anymore? Like, genuinely, I'm baffled by this.
A typical example is more popular searches crowding out actual answers to your question.
I have had this a lot of times with IT problems, I am a sys admin and google a ton of things related to my job. But 5 out of 10 times some keyword will relate to a simple problem many people have with their pc and all relative answers to my exact question get drowned out.
Google anything related to 'laptop monitor turn off' and you will only find results telling you how to turn of sleep when you close the lid. No matter how much syntaxing or formatting you do with your search
I'm not even a sysadmin, just a power user and this infuriates me to no end. I gave up on a search just a couple days ago because I kept getting bottom tier answers. Like thanks but I already know how to use my computer, now tell me how to fix this problem.
C'mon now. "Laptop monitor turn off" has never generated a good result, even in the before time. I share the question: what are these people searching for that Google is generally yielding worse results than other engines? For anything sysadmin, IT-related, or any sort of troubleshooting, I've always needed to be creative to get to the good stuff.
That's not what they're saying. They mean that if your search contains that or is somewhat adjacent (despite being more specific), your results will be drowned in it. For example, if you had something like "laptop monitor turn off when bla bla bla", 90% of the results will completely ignore what you've added.
I've got to deal with the same shit whenever I have to deal with complicated programming questions. Half the results will be related to some really basic mistake on the user's side that I haven't done, and I'll need to spend a lot of time trying to find the magical word combination that doesn't trigger those non-related issues and actually show me what I need.
Yeah, and what I was saying is it's always been that way since the first search engines started popping up.
Stupid searches yield stupid results
You're a Systems Administrator, but Google Tier 2 issues, do you provide break fix support? I thought as a SA you would be working behind the scenes on systems (apps), servers, etc.
Can't speak for the person you're replying to, but I'm a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn't my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking "this is obviously a problem with $system, let's just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!" And then we get the fun job of proving it's not us and has no relation to us.
We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them...
I think this is a training issue that needs to be resolved at the Helpdesk level. I understand that nobody is perfect but if you keep seeing tickets like that - Helpdesk managers need to update their training modules and start tweaking the Helpdesk system to have service requests go to the proper groups. Incident tickets are another story but that's where the training comes in.
Torrents, modded apk's,...
Check out my results for some chinese download service called "Content Plaza" for example:
Google:
Yandex:
Like, 2? On the 'entire' internet? 2? Right...
Was Yandex respecting your query there?
Added quotation marks for “terabox” as well, and it was fascinating across providers:
Yandex agreed with your Google search…
…but not mine:
DDG coming in with one result:
Startpage, just one result?!
…nope, not from the “mobile site”:
Bing didn’t care about those silly quotation marks, here are a thousand results:
Yet if I enter something like 'resolv' in Google I need to add '-resolve' to not get hundreds of unrelated results... Same goes for any not-too-popular software that is named a slight misspelling of their purpose... I even find it ridiculous how often first results litterally say underneath they did not contain your query...
But with terabox and "content plaza" it gives 2 results?
Startpage I have no idea, but I'm guessing they, like many, use the Google API for webcrawler results... 1 result? Those are pretty common words,...
Google straight up lies to me about movies an actor has been in, almost every time. “Wow, I had no idea Robert Downey Jr was in Mean Girls! Who did he play?” checks imdb “no he fuckin wasn’t wtf google” (this is an arbitrary example I just made up because I don’t feel like finding a real one right now)
That is a dumb feature that shouldn't be trusted.
I mean if they got it right it would be a handy feature lol, but yes it clearly can’t be trusted so I stopped bothering
Right. I just think it was overly ambitious. It's right just enough to earn trust and wrong just enough to burn you. I had a really, really dumb argument once because of that feature
Ah, yes, arbitrary examples. I can make those up too.
google claims Alan Tudyk is in Andor, he isn't
imdb for andor
imdb for alan tudyk
Is he not slated for season two? I thought that robot he voiced was going to be in it, I remember reading some article months ago though I admit I only have a passing interest in the show.
I see speculation but nothing solid. I think google is pulling from the rumors, which it really shouldn’t. If he is slated then that’s fine, let me know if you find anything
I don't actually care enough to go looking into it, I was just mentioning what I remember reading.
yes that’s why I made up an arbitrary example of something I had experienced firsthand
Me not caring enough to confirm if Alan Tudyk is going to be in the second season of a show I haven't even watched is not a good excuse for you to just make up shit to try to make a point.
you are spreading made up shit as we speak to prove your own point, and you’re very rude. you have reached a conclusion and think anyone who disagrees with you is either a liar or stupid. bye
I don't ever remember calling you a liar or stupid, but okay. Also not sure what made up thing I said, or what point I'm trying to prove. I kinda think we are having two completely different conversations.
oh okay, you wanna be like that
Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project's own single-page FAQ.
Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but "how to use a terminal window in Windows." Or at best, Ralph Brown's big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.
I just tried "ASCII scan codes" or "DOS scan codes". Both gave me what you asked for in Google in the top three results, with the first one including tables that listed both ASCII values and scan codes for reference.
I use DDG and if the result is not what I'm looking for, I add !g to forward the query to Google.
80% of the times, I need to add !g because DDG is clueless.
I wish I could say otherwise but Google search results are still better overall than DDG.
Sure, for some specific thematics, DDG will do better. But that's for quite niche subjects.
Very surprised to see people talk about DDG like it's at the same level or better than Google.
I made the switch to DDG a few days ago and it actually is insane how much more relevant the information is compared to google.
The latest in hipster rants. apparently not easy to find on Google ;)