• hertg@infosec.pub
    491·
    3 months ago

    If you want to find solutions online, stop using Google.

    Sometimes I post stuff to my blog about things that I could not find a satisfying solution to and where I had to figure one out myself. I post those things because I want it to be discoverable by the next person who is searching for it.

    I did a quick test, and my posts don’t show up anywhere on Google. I can find them via Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and even Bing. But Google doesn’t show my stuff, even when hitting specific keywords that only my post talks about. And if my site even shows up, it is only about +6 months after I posted.

    Even tried their search console thing, it doesn’t report any issues with my site. So it must be the lack of ads, cookies, and AI generated content which makes Google suspicious of it.

    So, If you are an engineer looking for solutions to your problems online, just stop using Google. It’s become so utterly useless, it’s ridiculous. Of course you will miss all the cool AI features and scam ads, but there’s always some drawbacks.

    _Reposting my post from Mastodon yesterday, it felt relevant. https://infosec.exchange/@hertg/112989703628721677_

    • zerofk@lemm.ee
      23·
      3 months ago

      I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.

      Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.

      And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.

      Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.

      I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.

    • Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.winEnglish
      111·
      3 months ago

      So it must be the lack of ads, cookies, and AI generated content which makes Google suspicious of it

      If your site isn’t integrated with Google’s Adsense infrastructure it is immediately at a disadvantage as Google won’t scan your site anywhere near as often, and even when it does will put the results way below anything else that does. It’s not that it finds your site suspicious, it is simply incentivized to really look hard at all the other sites paying for service.

    • Subverb@lemmy.world
      7·
      3 months ago

      I totally came to say this. Google has become designed to tarpit you into staying on the site longer. They no longer have the goal of giving you what you want quickly, they want you to see more ads.

      Google makes $307/yr. per user. They are strongly motivated to tarpit us. If we want a clean search experience we need to be open to the idea of paying.

      As an embedded systems dev that searches a lot of obscure stuff, I use Kagi and love it. Go try its free searches and see for yourself.

      If you value your time and mental stability, please do yourself a favor and go see what clean, high quality search results look like on Kagi.

    • MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub
      6·
      3 months ago

      It kinda depends what you’re looking for. For technical stuff DDG is much better than Google (I don’t know about kagi) but for local information Google still gives better results. Google seems to return what it thinks you want to search for and not what you actually tell it to so for exact searches it’s always worse. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for Google can be better sometimes.

      • Subverb@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 months ago

        Please try kagi.

        Not saying it’s you, but some people that think paying for Search is silly have forgotten how wonderful clean searches with actual answers are.

        • MicrowavedTea@infosec.pub
          1·
          3 months ago

          I’ve gotten pretty used to DDG’s interface. I’ll try kagi at some point but I don’t know if I’d use it full time.

    • kameecoding@lemmy.world
      6·
      3 months ago

      Google used to better than ddg like a year ago, now it’s almost completely unusable for development and I find myself going back to ddg and actually finding what I want instead of some unrelated nonsense, ads and LLM output crap

    • ramenu@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      In contrast to my experience, all the other search engines stink. Google is the only good one. But I suggest using a frontend like Araa if you want privacy.

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
    171·
    3 months ago

    [off topic]

    I’ve been telling people to read ‘Cryptonomicon’ for decades.

    It tells two interwoven stories. Back in WW2 the grandfather is involved in proactive missions to keep the Nazis from learning the Allies had broken their codes, and in the late 1990’s the grandson is trying to start an online bank

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
        91·
        3 months ago

        I had a long flight so I took along Reamde.

        I’d read it twice before, but damned if it didn’t hook me up again. I got to the first airport around 10 am and didn’t get home until 3 am. Saved my sanity.

        For the uninitiated, Reamde involves the kidnapped niece of a billionaire game maker; the game is really fun and also a money laundering operation. There are terrorists, Right Wing militias, undercover spies, demented science fiction authors, and a bear skin rug.

    • blackluster117@possumpat.io
      3·
      3 months ago

      I remembering stumbling into this book at a shop a while back, reading the synopsis on the back and then the first page thinking “This should be fun.” I was not prepared for how enthralling and deep the story went. Perfect travel book, loved reading it on flights. Would be amazing to see it adapted as an HBO show, especially the hunt in the forest towards the end. I was laughing so hard!

  • reboot6675@sopuli.xyz
    4·
    3 months ago

    If you’re asking for real, Designing Data-Intensive Applications is probably the best I’ve ever read (if you’re into that kind of thing)