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Google “search” (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by themaninblack to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 11 months ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] micka190 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

C’mon now. “Laptop monitor turn off” has never generated a good result

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, and what I was saying is it's always been that way since the first search engines started popping up.

[–] scottywh -2 points 11 months ago

Stupid searches yield stupid results

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