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- cross-posted to:
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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.
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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.
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.
If I’m looking up something general, like some actor or tv show, then DDG is perfect. If im troubleshooting some weird software issue then i find it doesnt always list as many results, as if it hasnt indexed as many sites.
DDG at least now means I can search random shit without it suddenly being inserted into my social media algorithms like some kind of psychological torture.
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
Immortal Tanks, those Brother printers. Best in the biz.
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.
What are better alternatives to fandom? I see the incumbents name get repeated more often than the alternative unfortunately.
The problem is that fandom tends to vacuum up and supersede the smaller wikis, and the SEO bullshit just makes it happen even faster. The answer to your question unfortunately is “it depends on the game/show/fandom”.
wiki.gg is where most of the wikis have transferred to, terraria for example
The demise of google search is by design. https://www.techspot.com/news/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-why-accused-killing-google-search.html TL;DR. Management noted that search revenue was not growing, so the head of google search Prabhakar Raghavan made it worse so you have to click more to get what you want. More clicks = more money = growth = happy investors = enshitification. Fuck you Prabhakar Raghavan.
From the article…
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.
I have to admit, it was an interesting read, not quite like anything I’ve ever read before, for a review.
I honestly can’t tell if this is just some genius way of sliding in some AI generated content into a review and getting it to pass our review, or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated with Google’s search algorithm paying attention to manipulation by others, so trying to really get their stuff out there for us to see.
Either way, it’s definitely worth the read.
As far as Brother printers go, I own an all-in-one laser that’s over a decade old, and it’s still going strong. And it actually works with Linux to boot. I do hate though that they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early, but if you mask sensors and such, then an existing toner will work forever.
they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early
My Brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves when toner is low.
The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that’s not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.
The alternative mode is to just show a “low toner” warning badge whenever you print a document. That’s what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don’t do. It looks like this:
As far as I know it’s just a simple counter - how many pages have you printed since it was replaced. Obviously that’s never going to be particularly accurate.
Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.
What, like the printer would explode or something similar kind of disaster?
Or the kind of where the printout doesn’t come out well, and you put a new cartridge in, and then you reprint and it looks fine, type of disaster?
It worked, SEO really sucks.
Heck, I didn’t even need “2024”, just “best printer” worked.
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.
There was an article about that recently. Apparently Marketing won the battle for control over Google Search. So it’s no longer focused on quality of product.
Google has also gotten lazy. Their first dozen or so searches are either YouTube or Reddit results. (And that’s only when they want to pretend they’re a search engine).
Can confirm, it’s still the top result under the sponsors. And it’s an amusing read.
Google used to list sites with backlinks highly, it was their first ever search algorithm iirc. Once people learned you could game that by planting useless backlinks, Google realised it was a bad idea.
Somehow, they’ve reinvented this all over again with parasite SEO that fundamentally works the same way. All they did was add some “domain ranking”. Now, unreliable-but-popular sites coughredditcough will always score highly regardless of quality, because Google deemed them superior.
reddit is a very good search resource though because it has 15 years of real people giving real information. I imagine reddit from here on out will be going hard on the enshitification train so it’s value as a search resource will rapidly decline.
Anything post-2022, and probably post-2020, is suspect on Reddit because it became abundantly clear how steerable it was and how easy to generate sales as long as you didn’t do anything too “suspicious”. Current ‘ad guides’ tell advertisers not to link things because just saying the name reads as more authentic.
Before that it was legitimately people discussing, e.g., the best flashlight for x-y-z purposes. But a decent amount of old stuff has been gutted by people deleting their posts/accounts.
After January 2015 it was a downhill slalom.
You weren’t around for the 2016 presidential elections.
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?
With the prevalence of reddit google was of the most useful tools I’ve seen in my 40 years on earth. Only to go to absolute shit in the last 2-3 years.
Missing the days of Consumer Reports. I think the velocity of new products is too high for them to be relevant for more than a few months once they release a report anymore.
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I saw a website that was selling Reddit bot services to companies that want to review their products. They would just send a swarm of bad accounts in there and make nice comments. Even replying to their own comments.
After that I stopped trusting almost every Reddit review (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
*Edit: meant to say bot accounts but leaving it
And Wirecutter used to be good but they will occasionally point out how highly rated something is, and cross checking against falespot et al indicates a lot of fake reviews.
The next good search engine will unironically be a Microsoft chatbot of some kind
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Sigh. So many things in the world are like this. It’s not a bad idea, in theory, to favor more recent pages in search results. Finding 4 year old information is often not what you want. But in practice, when everyone knows this bias exists, they just fiddle with their pages daily to try to fool the algorithm. It must be aggravating to be Google, because as smart as they are, the entire world is engaged in an unending and ruthless quest to game their results for personal gain.
Give SearxNG a try. There are browser plugins available for it. I was using Librey but I’m finding SearxNG to be better.
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.
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
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
