- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
- technology@lemmy.world
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google’s quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don’t get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.
The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”
And super specific queries?
For me it’s programming issues. I guess devs know that doing SEO would shoot themselves in the foot.
Could you elaborate? You’re saying you’re going to google for programming issues, but at the same time devs don’t do SEO?
Sure. What I mean is that when I search for issues in duck duck go, I don’t see relevant results. But then I put “!g” and what I want (usually stack overflow or GitHub) comes to the top.
So it makes sense that programming sites do tags and keywords properly to optimize things for the user instead of trying promote their site no matter what.
At least that’s my guess anyway.
Stack overflow has been one of the consistently reliable googleable sites for decades.
It’s a shame Quora has strayed so far from their initial cloning of SO’s site. It seems to be turning into AskYahoo 2 fast from the results I’ve seen lately.
deleted by creator
Yup. I constantly found myself appending !g for important queries that I needed an answer for right then and now. Google has stopped providing that commodity. It’s almost never worth it anymore to fall back to Google.
deleted by creator
What? Why do you think that?
No it has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone.
My DDG searches have been absolute garbage for the past few months. About 75% of the time I have to re-search my keywords on Google to actually get a relevant result.
It’s bad enough that I’m about to switch back to Google.
That’s not been my experience. I’ve been using DDG for years, and when I first switched I would occasionally have to go find something on Google instead. That slowly fell off as the years went by because going to Google and getting better search results became rarer and rarer. It’s to the point now where I don’t even do it, unless I need to look at something on street view.
I second this, this has been my experience exactly. It’s gotten so bad that not only do I not need the Google fallback, but I’m starting to feel like the DDG results are better than the Google ones in the first place.
Better than Google now, but still not better than Google back then. It my experience at least.
Unfortunately, this has also been my DuckDuckGo experience for several months. I wish it wasn’t
Try Startpage. I have just started using it so I can’t tell you how it compares. I also need to look up who owns it. But I have been told it has the same privacy qualities of DDG.
I used to like it, but there was one incident where it fed me links to phishing sites. Like all the results were malicious. I suspect they had an internal breach or the session was somehow hijacked. That was years ago, but it made me wary. It’s usually okay.
Good to know I haven’t fully switched yet. I am definitely going to look more closely at its parents company and where it has servers.
Funny. I primarily used Startpage for the last few years, but have had increasing problems with them providing bad/irrelevant results and frequently straight-up blocking my IP or requiring completion of a CAPTCHA before providing results. I switched to DDG, which has been working pretty well, and seems much better to me than it had when trying it a few years ago.
It depends on what your searching. For me programming questions are way better on google.
Also searching obvious questions like a country’s population, google still does its job there too.
Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites.
use Indie Wiki Buddy extension to get rid of fandom.
https://getindie.wiki/Or ublacklist to block any site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
That works too, but indie buddy works better because it gives you a direct link to the proper indie wiki page in search results rather than just blocking Fandom and leaving you with nothing.
This extension stopped working correctly for me some time ago. It just stopped redirecting to breezewiki correctly.
Hmm. Has it updated, and have you allowed it the correct site permissions? Every once in a while it’ll ask you to update the site modification permissions.
I’ve had zero issues with it on Firefox and DDG. May vary on other browsers and search engines though.
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.
Use breezewiki extension. Redirects fandom articles to a frontend that removes their bullshit and replaces fandom with independant wikis when possible.
Immortal Tanks, those Brother printers. Best in the biz.
If you have any tips or tricks for DDG please do share! I’m definitely getting better overall results there, but the local ones can still be a bit rough.
I’m no expert but this should be useful: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/duckduckgo-search-tricks-student/
What do you mean by “local”? If you mean finding somewhere to go for lunch or the opening hours of a store, I recommend using the maps app on your phone (I prefer Apple Maps over Google, because it uses Yelp and TripAdvisor for reviews which are accurate than Google reviews… if I had an Android phone I’d probably install Yelp/TripAdvisor).
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
Unfortunately DDG has been dogshit in my native language. Shame
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.
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
Destroying search engines as a career…
Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.
Personally really like ddg over it though. Only gotta be more precise with keywording for finding what you need.
I use DDG but i do wonder what i dont see sometimes.
I often google a specific brand of components at work and even with the exact brand and/or part number in the search it sometimes doesnt turn up any results (say 5-7 random unrelated webpages) and thats it. Then i put the same search in google and bam, top result.That’s what I said - the right key wording. It’s pretty strict, whereas Google’s results sometimes are a tiny bit more loose understanding of what you roughly mean. Though not always, and on Google I found myself often just adding “Reddit” for specifics. Though really really depends on what you search.
For me DDG offers a lot more than just search results, the bangs and features like I added a script to directly port my questions to some AI is really useful.
I don’t know what “right” key wording you want if not the exact model and part number.
Quotes help. So
"model" "part number"since those force them to be in the results. DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results.“DDG likes to ignore parts of your query to get more results.”
Wow sounds extremely useful and like a feature I want. I love searching for something specific and they are like “did you mean totally unrelated thing?”
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”
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.
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.
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
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.
Yup, I rarely use Reddit these days, and when I do, I use old reddit. Oh, and I never log in, no need for that nonsense.
That was my issue with old school SymForums. I don’t see that so much on reddit.
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.
Why can’t someone replicate old Google pagerank?
Pagerank worked first, but SEO adapted since with link farming.
DDG is better, but only in the sense that Google got so bad that now it’s worse than it.
I’ve found DDG to be adequate for the majority of things I search, but when I need something specific or with some nuance, it fails miserably. For that reason I still use Google when I do stuff for work, or when I do troubleshooting. For my daily usage DDG is just fine, though.
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 :/
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.
I’m of the opinion that it will require human interaction to fix this. It can’t be purely 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. And at the time, that meant real human beings were making those links. 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.
Tough to do when those services tend to get infiltrated by bots as well.
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.
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.
I honestly think it will have to be semi curated and look a lot like a more complex digital version of an encyclopedia.
I mean I think the stupid LLM craze is from trying to make something like that in the vain of the “Hitchhikers Guide” but without having to do the actual work and using autogenerated articles except that makes them prone to being false. The Hitchhikers Guide still had writers and people entering and double checking information.
It can then further link you to related stuff from the web but the wide spread of information is somewhat dead since it’s now the product to be sold and free and easy sharing of it would ruin profit margins.
Kagi is better
I’m almost convinced that Kagi comments on Lemmy are spam. Please prove me wrong:
Has anyone here tried Kagi because of a recommendation from here and, well, actually found it better than the rest?
I use it, but to be honest I did not do a comprehensive comparison. I like it mostly for the fine grained website control. For work and some personal stuff I often look for code and can push websites like GitHub to appear more often. Or I can block Pinterest in my search results. I tried to do this in SearXNG, but this was too much of a hassle so in a way I pay kagi for convenience. I recently got a new job and will evaluate in the coming months if it is still worth the money, but right now I am satisfied. Nobody else I know would pay for a search engine, so I can understand the stance, but I am really fed up with all the advertising and enshitification so I thought why not give it a try. And yes, because it was recommended here.
Thank you for your insight. Much better than the usual, “oh yeah, Kagi is good. All praise Kagi!”
Your account makes it sound very appealing, so I’ll check Kagi out more closely.
I didn’t get recommended it here, but elsewhere. I ended up paying for a years worth last year and yeah I like it better than pretty much everything else. There is still a rare occasion that I need to use Google, but that is maybe once a week whereas with DuckDuckGo it was multiple times per-day.
I did lol, why the hell would I recommend it otherwise?
It’s a search engine, so to be better than the others it’s obvious it would have to return better results than the usual ad-based crap — and it does. There is a free trial and you can check out if it’s worth it for you btw
It has quite a lot of QoL features for searches, but their main one — searching — is worth the cost; if you do a search once in a blue moon or append “Reddit” at the end of a query, it’s not imo since any search engine is “good enough” for that. If you instead actually do a search without having a specific website in mind, it’s good. You can also filter out the quora and other shitty websites results, which is nice
I did lol, why the hell would I recommend it otherwise?
Not directly saying that you’re doing this, but c’mon, you know the answer. Why would anyone recommend a paid product?
There is a free trial and you can check out if it’s worth it for you btw
Nice! I didn’t know there was a trial. Good to know.
You can also filter out the quora and other shitty websites results, which is nice
Oh, now we’re talking!! That’s very cool.
Cause the free alternatives are trash, so… it’s not like “free is better” is always true
chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.
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.
Zitron, though, describes him as “a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect.”
Based
And by making the search engine worse and worse, they open the opportunity to bring AI chat as a “savior”, and people will think it revolutionized internet search.
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.
There are very few printers that don’t work with Linux. Linux has drivers to interface with most of them through whatever means you like, right in the kernel.
That’s one of the reasons my android phone (Linux kernel, remember) is better at finding and queuing up prints on a network printer than any windows machine I’ve ever used.
I just hit share on a document, choose print… And then it just works.
There are very few printers that don’t work with Linux.
I was speaking with the all-in-one types, that includes scanners and fax machines.
Most printer companies don’t make their drivers work well with Linux (or at the very least used to not), and even Brother was in that same boat early on.
But as of late they’re much better, so when you run a Brother installer for the drivers it just installs and works now, where in the past you had to worry about 32 bit versus 64 bit libraries in the OS and how they interact with the brother drivers, etc., etc.
I have an MFC-9340 and have also run into this problem. The drivers available in cups allow me to either print two-sided in b&w, or print single-sided in color (at least for the drivers that work at all with the printer). I finally broke down and installed the binary from Brother to get it working fully, but it’s annoying that I can’t just use a generic driver with this printer.
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?
The guy who wrote it is the editor-in-chief.
The guy who wrote it is the editor-in-chief.
Yep. I mentioned that in my comment…
or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated
Could you elaborate on your point?
He’s the one that would be doing the review. It isn’t about trying to “sneak in” AI content
It isn’t about trying to “sneak in” AI content
But he says right in the article that he’s including AI content at the bottom of the article, to pad it out.
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.
My point is if he’s being honest and that’s the true reason, or just being sneaky and trying to slip in AI content into a human written article.
Well if he announces it, I’m not sure how it’s being sneaky and slipping it in. But either way, what would that achieve?
But either way, what would that achieve?
Us being more acceptive of, and not belligerent to, AI written articles.
Nilay Patel - the editor in chief is anti-AI especially when it comes to article content. He doesn’t allow anyone at the company to use generated content except when they are writing an article about AI and even then only to demonstrate a point - e.g. “here’s a comparison of two LLMs with the same prompt”. It was also his decision to stop AI’s from crawling any content on their website.
He used AI to pad the article because that’s what real spam articles do. It had nothing to do with acceptance.
The thing is that the AI text is atrocious and vapid. It takes up a lot of space and says
“Laser printers are better in every way minus full color than inkjets, but are bigger and more expensive than inkjet printers.”
The trick is that AI took 12 paragraphs and using a list incorrectly to do it instead of a sentence. And the editor calls it out for that.
And the editor calls it out for that.
Not disputing that. My point, tongue-in-cheek, was if an editor says “hey I’m going to pad my article with a bad AI written portion”, then we lower our guard, and are more acceptive of including AI write ups in reviews.
It’s a gag, I promise. He’s talked about it on their podcast
One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don’t actually need to print but that’s pretty cool.
One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don’t actually need to print but that’s pretty cool.
People keep missing that I’m talking about a all-in-one, and not just a simple printer-only.
I never had a problem with the printing part of the all-in-one printer, but the scanning and faxing stuff required the Brother driver support, and that wad not natively supported, or were supposed to be supported but it didn’t work well, or at all. There were issues with 32-bit versus 62-bit libraries, etc.
Took years to get to a point where the brother drivers would just install and everything would work right. And not everything ever worked right from native Linux.
The comment I replied to didn’t mention you had any issues. I just wanted to mention something I had noticed that I thought was cool. Not trying to get into a debate about it.
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).
I think you’ll enjoy watching the movie called Idiocracy. It is your AltaVista search result extrapolated to full life.
It worked, SEO really sucks.
Heck, I didn’t even need “2024”, just “best printer” worked.
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.
Can confirm, it’s still the top result under the sponsors. And it’s an amusing read.
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?
I don’t get ads in general. They don’t work. I never bought something that got presented to me from an ad because I know ads are deliberately lying to me, so the product they show is the first product I don’t consider purchasing.
Time to time i watch twitch from an iPad that I use only for that and an ad banner appeared of a weird but useful adapter for USBC. I clicked on it on purpose (first ad I clicked in a decade probably) the link wasn’t working, dead link. I was speechless.
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.
I still sign up with them when I’m researching bigger, or long-lasting, purchases. Cars, washing machine, and that sort of thing. I’m always a little annoyed at the price, but the content is SO MUCH better than any other online review source that I’m always happy with my decision in the end. Reddit comments are probably second, but I’ve found those to be littered with what seem to me to be suspiciously positive reviews for items that are not significantly better than their competition. I feel like I need to dial up my critical nature to 10 to fight against the echo chamber and/or the covert advertising.
I get Consumer Reports free through my library. You may too!
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
I saw it too and did the same thing.
Reddit posts could always be company astroturfing as well.
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.
This was actually a very funny read.
Also yes, Brother printers are the best because they actually work.
The next good search engine will unironically be a Microsoft chatbot of some kind
Takes all of the AI processing power in the world to make Bing a good search engine
You mean current Bing co-pilot?
Bing has gotten so much worse in the last 5 years, it’s not even better than google anymore
Search results aside, why can I no longer copy the result from Bing’s calculator anymore
I only ever knew Bing as being good for porn. Maybe a porn aficionado can confirm if it still is
Yeah Bing used to be lagging behind Google on censorship so you could find shit that Google wanted to hide once. Now, it all sucks.
Their video pages gives way fewer results than before
Just did a test searching “porn” and scrolled for 3 seconds before reaching the end of the results
If I do a search though I can get the same 3 results for 20 pages before finding a new one
Lol, Copilot is easily the dumbest AI assistant. It’s completely useless, it just spews bullshit.
It just parses the first few results
It’s the same as the search engine
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.
Yup, and that’s why we shouldn’t have one dominant search engine, but a few that all do things differently. That way gaming the system is a lot more difficult. But I guess that’s not the world we live in, because everyone wants to use “the best,” which means “the best” will eventually degrade due to everyone gaming it.
you are a printer we are all printers
Technically we are highly complex, self replicating 3D printers.
I’m not, but my wife is
oh man, you made me think so many bad jokes about this… 😅
Yeah, well PC LOAD LETTER
yes i also noticed google search is absolute trash lately. so i switched to searx and life is better. i only go to google for street view and reverse image search now.
For reverse image search, Google is also becoming more and more useless. I usually also look on Yandex to identify fake profiles using photos of other people.
Where does Yandex’s money go these days?
I don’t know. Just noticed that their normal Russian web search redirects to “Dzen”, whereas images.yandex.ru is still showing as “Yandex”.
Kagi is still working super well for me.
