this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 198 points 1 year ago (3 children)

"We've ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here's a bunch of pinterest and quora spam."

[–] Darkard@lemmy.world 62 points 1 year ago

"hey, is that a brand name? Here's 9 sketchy looking shopping sites selling things that have that brand name on them"

[–] S_204@lemm.ee 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I installed the extension that removes Pinterest from searches.... it's great.

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[–] ohlaph@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

Those two sites are absolute skid marks.

[–] ChaoticEntropy@feddit.uk 101 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.

[–] DrMango@lemmy.world 82 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Google "Best vacuum cleaner"

Top 6 hits: "We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can't really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money."

[–] GARlactic@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

And the website is called something like Best-Vacuum-Cleaners-Blog.com

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[–] Saneless@lemmy.world 85 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Search engine protocol:

Ignore first few results (ads)

Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)

Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare

Ignore subsection of reddit links

Find 0-1 useful links on first page

Regret

[–] Shialac@lemmy.world 52 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you

[–] Saneless@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I know. But I'll use them as a last resort

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[–] Uphillbothways@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Trying to find the tiny "show more results" button sandwiched between the first page of shit results and the weird AI bubbles of shit results just to find semi-decent shit on pages 2-3 makes me wish i was dead every single time.

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[–] Blapoo@lemmy.ml 71 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of "search term"

[–] whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"AI" is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.

And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won't happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.

If the data they consume is filled with something like "fossil fuels don't cause global warming because XYZ", the chat bots will repeat it. They don't have the capacity to reason.

There hasn't been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it's easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.

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[–] Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

You can already outsource a lot of this to Bing. If you need to know the right temperature for making french fries, you can google a bunch of “recipes” (AKA life story of the author + history + vacation photos + cooking instructions) read them through and… actually better make some coffee while you’re at it because this is going to take a while. Anyway, the other option is to ask: “Hey Bing, I’m making french fries, but I don’t know how hot the oven should be.”

Spoiler: 220 °C

The scary thing is, what happens when people start doing this for more important things, such as what to do if your child has swallowed something or how to parallel park your car.

[–] Barbarian772@feddit.de 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

200 or 220, depends on if you are using a convection oven. But that's beside the point, I really hope AI finally kills SEO.

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[–] Anamana@feddit.de 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

True but they will learn the concept 'inefficency increases individual profits'. Google has been getting worse and so will AI search eventually.

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[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 61 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is especially frustrating when trying to find parts for vehicles or machinery. Used to, one could search for something like "1988 Suzuki Samurai Oil Filter" and get the answer for all the common filter brands. But now all you get is links to an auto parts website, where you have to use their shitty search function and hope they have what you need.

[–] Etienne_Dahu@jlai.lu 10 points 1 year ago

I know your pain, I've skipped it entirely and always go for the part number. There are great resources for BMWs with sites like realoem.com, but what about other manufacturers?

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[–] MrSlicer@lemmy.world 56 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.

[–] markr@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Product information search is now totally useless. I used to be able to use a part number to find a manual, now it is just scammers Amazon and eBay.

YouTube videos were once good sources for DIY, now the useful shit is buried behind product placement bullshitters.

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[–] FiskFisk33@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I want to search for recipes that are not blog posts

[–] slowjoe@lemmy.zip 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago (17 children)

We need a Google successor.

Something non-profit.

[–] dx1@lemmy.world 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The horrible reality is that Bing has actually become a competitor to Google, simply by Google getting worse and worse. Microsoft used to be the main bad guy, but these days they practically seem benign compared to the others. Not open source like you're saying, of course.

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[–] Captain_Shakespeare@reddthat.com 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.

I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it's a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where 'using the computer' is a minor task of one's workday.

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[–] ghariksforge@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago

wait until the AI chatbots are optimized with SEO spam.

[–] Octavio@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Somebody mentioned something about a thing in outer space called a dark star. It sounded interesting so I googled it and got millions of links about a Grateful Dead tribute band called the Dark Star Orchestra. I’m sure I’ll be seeing ads for that for months. 😂 ChatGPT gave me a nice summary but of course I didn’t have any way of knowing whose work I was reading.

[–] FunnyUsername@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Or even if it was accurate.

The future seemed so much more promising when I was a teenager. Now I'm mid 30s and the present is very.... corporate and lame. Very lame. They've even programmed the younger generation to be sanitized and accepting of blandness. Imagine growing up with only one or two genuinely creative movies being released a year. Zoomers don't even have their own music genre, it's all just nostalgia. Sigh.

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[–] Raglesnarf@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (12 children)

my lil trick is I'd just add "Reddit" after most searches to find others in a similar situation or maybe a solution

[–] berrodeguarana 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

2 months ago that was fine.

Now I don't have an app for that, the website on my mobile doesn't open my search and instead tells me to download the official Reddit app, or the subs are nsfw or private.

Sigh, so much for easy answers at a type of the finger :(

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[–] pitl@lemmy.sdf.org 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Up until the API debacle, that was my solution too. Now even that doesn't work. It's so bizarrely hard to look something up on the internet now.

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[–] InternetUser2012@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

https://librex.devol.it/

It's pretty amazing to search for something and actually see things you searched for.

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[–] Annoyed_Crabby@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Tfw you searched something and the top10 answer is mostly copied homework without much variation, and then the best one is from reddit.

[–] CaptionAdam@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

If you have avoided learing how to use the internet/search engines till now you probably couldn't learn if you tryed

[–] Arsenal4ever@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Google is trash. I guess people suck for doing SEO like asshats

[–] UnknownQuantity@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I ran a business, built my website and done SEO according to advice found on the internet practically just using keywords related to my business. My goal was not to be on page 2 or 3 when people look for similar businesses. The site ended up always as a first result. I did not tinker with it, never paid for adwords/adsense. I don't think I was being an asshole, just trying to make a living.

The problem seems to lie with Google. I remember days when I could search it for topics of interest and get results that were informative and didn't try to sell me shit. Google is now reminiscent more of a mall and search results are shop fronts in the mall.

[–] jemorgan@lemm.ee 25 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yeah I don’t think businesses doing SEO is really the issue here.

It’s the millions of low-quality, garbage blogspam websites that have SEOd their way into filling the first 10 pages of every single search.

What’s a good canister vacuum? What I can I do for fun in Sparks, Nevada? Why is my cat throwing up? It doesn’t matter what you search for, you’re going to get articles filled with 6000 words of barely-passable English that you have to scroll through, with an add between every paragraph, until you finally get to the part where they “answer” the question with the most common-sense, useless, vague pile of word vomit that proves the author doesn’t know any more about the topic than you do.

But it’s no accident that that’s what Google has tuned their algorithm to prioritize. They’ve got as much of an interest in making you look at those ads as the website, because the ads come from Google and that’s their entire business model.

[–] UnknownQuantity@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

I'm finding that those searches will be advertisement for a vet clinic, hotels in Sparks, Nevada and they will all have a blog about this and that in vague terms advising you to spend money on the issue. Years ago I was building a water garden and found tons of useful info, a couple of years ago I decided to make a big pond and all those sites with the useful info are either gone or buried on page 73. What's at the front is retailers of pond/garden/aquatic equipment with the same drivel about your cat throwing up.

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[–] bitsplease@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

idk - you can't really blame website owners for optimizing their SEO, it's google's fault for using such a game-able system IMO

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[–] Chocrates@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How do we find information these days? I still default to my search engine, which is often google. I moonlight over to DDG often, but usually an operating system upgrade gets me back on Google for a while.

[–] emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 year ago

I used to just use Google but add reddit to the end of the search, and it'd usually pick up several relevant posts/conversations that would have the answer I wanted somewhere in the comments. I'll still keep doing that for a while probably, but given how reddit has been going, and with people erasing their accounts, I doubt that will last long. I'm holding out hope for a good search functionality on lemmy, since reddits own search was pretty unusable.

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[–] NettoHikari@social.fossware.space 12 points 1 year ago (11 children)

That's why I use Kagi. It's a paid search engine and the results are actually really good.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 1 year ago (6 children)

This whole thread reads like astroturfers

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[–] forvirreth@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

True, and it should be taught way better. There are so many nifty tricks when it comes to search engines that the average user don't know about.

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