Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers
www.theverge.com
After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale.

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.

  • Pxtl@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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”

      • duffman@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        That was my issue with old school SymForums. I don’t see that so much on reddit.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • starman2112@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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

          • ShepherdPie@midwest.socialEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            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.

    • erwan@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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 :/

      • aesthelete@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • Hypx@fedia.io
          0·
          2 months ago

          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.

      • magic_lobster_party@kbin.run
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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.