I definitely feel the pain when it comes to worthless results nowadays. Though in this case DDG comes through:
Adding documentation to the search makes the “correct” page soar to the top:
Google is better as a verb than a search engine.
I use “search” as a verb
In desperation you click the link to the old docs, change the version to the latest version and pray you don’t get a 404
Been there. Done that. FML on searching for programming help some days. Versioning is a nightmare as the way you “used” to do things is no longer relevant and the rest of the results are some asshole saying it is a duplicate question that was answered 10 years ago…that is no longer fucking relevant!
Sorry. Yesterday sucked. I hope today is less frustration and more things working like they are supposed to.
As someone who is trying to teach themselves a few new things this year by diving to projects using them… I seriously, seriously feel you. It honestly makes me question whether I should just abandon each project I start, both professional and personal.
All the relevant hits are from years and/or 2+ versions of whatever ago or forum posts with dead links to an alleged solution.
I feel like in the past I could just dive into something and search my way through it. Now I feel like that era is over and I question whether it’s me, my niche project idea, the disappearing community, or just the search engines.
Oh, that stuff happens all the time. The one that really pissed me off was Microsoft 404-ing basically their entire KB system.
That thing was standing for so long you could still find Windows 9x stuff on it, and it was glorious.
Around the time they stopped supporting windows 7, they bricked the entire thing up and started a new system. Overnight, all the Microsoft help article links went dead. Find a good forum post about an issue that you’re having and someone replied with a link to the MS KB saying little more than “this should work” followed by a sea of commenters saying thanks, that worked, but when you follow the link, it goes nowhere.
What a fucking waste.
entire KB system
And right before they did that, they started removing footnotes from KB articles that only dealt with older OSes, so if you ever needed to go back and find something, it just wasn’t there anymore. For example certain RGB packing formats were only supported on newer OSes and the footnote used to tell you that, but then it disappeared. I have been directly affected by that multiple times.
Well internet enshitification is real…
You are confusing Google and Internet… they are very different things.
What it’s like to use Google in 2024
But they’re so innovative! They absolutely aren’t deserving of a massive antitrust lawsuit… /s
Something is not perfect in the world. Gosh, I sure hope the American government comes along soon and corrects this by force.
Anti-trust is not about seeking perfection, it’s a defense against abuses of power. That’s a good thing unless you like to be abused by the powerful, in which case lick some more boots.
Wait until you see the AI generated blog posts being top results…
For certain languages and frameworks, LLMs are horrible right now because of this. Many answers I get are a Frankenstein of different versions.
The worse part, you enter the blog, it looks legitimate enough at a glance, go straight to the code, then find out it’s bullshit.
We need ai blog blockers now…
There has been something similar for years: a page that basically says “Yeah, nah, we don’t have any information for that, but you might be interested in a totally irrelevant something else”, but phrased in a way that gets it high in the results. What’s astonishing is that Google doesn’t punish those pages.
Why would they punish pages that help them serve more ads? There are ads on the search, ads on the useless result, ads when you refine the query.
