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.
you are a printer we are all printers
Yeah, well PC LOAD LETTER
Best breadcrumb from article:
I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these [SEO/Google] people making money off of everyone else’s misery?
I don’t get ads in general. They don’t work. I never bought something that got presented to me from an ad because I know ads are deliberately lying to me, so the product they show is the first product I don’t consider purchasing.
Time to time i watch twitch from an iPad that I use only for that and an ad banner appeared of a weird but useful adapter for USBC. I clicked on it on purpose (first ad I clicked in a decade probably) the link wasn’t working, dead link. I was speechless.
yes i also noticed google search is absolute trash lately. so i switched to searx and life is better. i only go to google for street view and reverse image search now.
Searx instances always seem to be blocked by the engines they rely on though?
i havent seen bad results at least. i use one with a good rating/latency listed on searx.space
For reverse image search, Google is also becoming more and more useless. I usually also look on Yandex to identify fake profiles using photos of other people.
Where does Yandex’s money go these days?
Omg I can’t believe they used AI to write this article 😡
People downvoting you without having read the article 😭
my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
Y’all mfs didn’t read the article lmao
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.
Oh my god the Fandom wiki for minecraft uses the same little tab icon as the actual minecraft wiki but it has a fucking “are you an adult or child” popup EVERY SINGLE TIME a page loads
I hate it so much
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.
Isn’t DDG owned by Google?
No it has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone.
What? Why do you think that?
DDG tries very hard to push Amazon and Ebay to me. They’re not even available in my country 😅
That seems like a bug assuming you have your region selected/enabled? I’d report it to DDG.
I don’t know why they would need my location/region. They’re already trying too hard to advertise stuff to me. Isn’t the internet like, international? Other search engines I never get that Ebay/Amazon stuff, it’s a DDG feature for whatever IP I get.
Immortal Tanks, those Brother printers. Best in the biz.
If you have any tips or tricks for DDG please do share! I’m definitely getting better overall results there, but the local ones can still be a bit rough.
I’m no expert but this should be useful: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/duckduckgo-search-tricks-student/
What do you mean by “local”? If you mean finding somewhere to go for lunch or the opening hours of a store, I recommend using the maps app on your phone (I prefer Apple Maps over Google, because it uses Yelp and TripAdvisor for reviews which are accurate than Google reviews… if I had an Android phone I’d probably install Yelp/TripAdvisor).
My DDG searches have been absolute garbage for the past few months. About 75% of the time I have to re-search my keywords on Google to actually get a relevant result.
It’s bad enough that I’m about to switch back to Google.
It depends on what your searching. For me programming questions are way better on google.
Also searching obvious questions like a country’s population, google still does its job there too.
Unfortunately, this has also been my DuckDuckGo experience for several months. I wish it wasn’t
That’s not been my experience. I’ve been using DDG for years, and when I first switched I would occasionally have to go find something on Google instead. That slowly fell off as the years went by because going to Google and getting better search results became rarer and rarer. It’s to the point now where I don’t even do it, unless I need to look at something on street view.
Try Startpage. I have just started using it so I can’t tell you how it compares. I also need to look up who owns it. But I have been told it has the same privacy qualities of DDG.
I used to like it, but there was one incident where it fed me links to phishing sites. Like all the results were malicious. I suspect they had an internal breach or the session was somehow hijacked. That was years ago, but it made me wary. It’s usually okay.
Good to know I haven’t fully switched yet. I am definitely going to look more closely at its parents company and where it has servers.
I deleted their app and moved search engines, they got shit quick. So bad at their main usp. I was constantly fed hyper local results, local even with location off. And dont get me started on how bad it was for porn.
It has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone. I have been using DDG for a decade. I noticed a distinct drop in search quality after the bing partnership.
Use breezewiki extension. Redirects fandom articles to a frontend that removes their bullshit and replaces fandom with independant wikis when possible.
Unfortunately DDG has been dogshit in my native language. Shame
For the record though, I used bing for the duration of 2023, sort of as an experiment to use the ai assistant.
Bing search is worse that Google by a long shot. I almost always gave up and used Google.
In my experience that’s only been true if you’re letting Google track you post-2020-ish. If you Google via tor or a VPN with no history so Google has no data about you, the results are trash, where Bing/DuckDuckGo (which is just Bing sans non-MS trackers) results are slightly better (although still much worse than Google before it sucked).
I see a lot of my friends actually use Bing through ChatGPT, and they seem to get better results than Google. That might be what Microsoft is actually optimizing Bing for
Honestly, I think almost everything else is worse than Google.
I set my default to duck duck go, and it’s getting better, but I still fall back on google with some regularity
Do any of us still use Google in this way though?
Sure maybe nanna still talks to google like an Oracle… “oh Google what is the best printer of 2024”
Yeah…have you ever had to buy new appliances? I just got a house, half my searches were for appliances, fittings and reviews and the results all sucked.
Well yeah I do have appliances, but I don’t think I’ve ever searched for product reviews for household appliances.
I just don’t find reviews for this stuff very helpful I guess.
It worked, SEO really sucks.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!
Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one.
Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.
Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
Brother laser printers are strong contenders, especially for black and white printing needs, but weigh the pros and cons against other options like inkjets before deciding.
The original article contains 428 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Ok, this summary won’t be useful in this article 😂
I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.
Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.
I think you’ll enjoy watching the movie called Idiocracy. It is your AltaVista search result extrapolated to full life.
Is that the one where the guy is frozen for 500 years? I watched that today.
Encino man?
Strange how Google became the default search engine back in the day because they were so good at filtering out the dumb websites that just spam search terms all over the page.
They’ve regressed and become Yahoo
Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.
Reddit used to be better, but now any time you search for advice on good _____ to buy, the only answers you can find are “use the search function, this question has been answered already”
I’ve noticed half the subs are now marked as “NSFW” when searching for something like a plumbing issue for example, which won’t allow you to see the posts without using the reddit app.
Use old.reddit as long as you’re able to. Don’t even need to log in (at least where I live), you just hit the “I’m 18” button
Yup, I rarely use Reddit these days, and when I do, I use old reddit. Oh, and I never log in, no need for that nonsense.
I do (and did when I was still there) use it on a desktop but on a phone it directs you to the terrible mobile site where the HVAC and plumbing subreddits are somehow NSFW and restricted. Maybe next time I’ll try to manually redirect to old.reddit and see if it works.
Are they actually recommending the Reddit search function? We shit on their internal search function for over a decade, and told people to just use Google and site:Reddit in the search.
That was my issue with old school SymForums. I don’t see that so much on reddit.
I think it takes a while for that kind of competitor to emerge and gain enough traction to become a genuine alternative option. The primary option everyone long since adopted kinda has to suck for a while :/
It also is going to take another leap in algorithm.
It was a hard problem to solve when Google’s founders cracked it, but it’s an even harder problem to solve now that you have state of the art spam bots filling the Internet full of shit that looks like it was composed by humans.
If someone cracks how to figure out whether something is ai or not (for real, not the fake solutions we have now) and adds that to a good search algorithm and filters the fake shit by default, they will have a hell of a product on their hands.
I’m of the opinion that it will require human interaction to fix this. It can’t be solved via algorithms.
What people don’t realize is that the original Google search algorithm, PageRank, effectively looks at how real humans interacted with the websites they were indexing. Only websites referenced by other websites were being considered by Google’s search engine. This gave them a real advantage over other, purely algorithmic search engines.
Something like this will have to be recreated. We will have to figure out a way of prioritizing search results that real human beings have found to be useful.
DDG has been around for quite a while. Now it was a few years ago I used it last time, but the reason I switched back to Google was because I was clearly less productive with DDG.
I don’t think something like duckduckgo is gonna be the eventual contender to take on google. I think it’ll have to be an engine with its own index or some kind of lateral solution.
Something like brave, kagi, qwant, or stract could maybe turn into something exciting with more momentum, but honestly I have a hard time seeing them be the kind of scrappy competitor with a new approach that unseats the old king who has lost their way in pursuit of more profit at the expense of product quality. None of them seem like they truly have a new approach, but only time will tell how that story plays out this time.
To be fair when Google solved SEO spam in 1999, thanks to pagerank, it was no small feat. The others were bad not because they abused ads but because they didn’t know how to deal with cheating webmasters.
chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.
Kagi is better
Not sure if you read the recent article or not, but the guy responsible for this enshittification came from Yahoo, where he applied the same policies. So you’re more literally correct than you may think
Destroying search engines as a career…
