jesus christ i fucking hate modern tech

i tried to search for "vegetable soup cooking time" and ddg just straight up said "fuck you i've decided you're searching for 'best vegetable soup recipe' instead"

i took a screenshot and told it to back it up but it doesn't show up anywhere in google photos

why does every search engine try to turn every search into a query specifically for the most useless listicles on earth. who is searching for "best xyz."

kids you don't understand you used to be able to type the information you wanted to know into the search bar on google.com and it would just do it. it was like magic

@sjolsen and you cant even fucking do term exclusions anymore!!! like they just dont fucking make a diffefrenece!!!

you didn't have to pose your query in the form of a question, you didn't have to exchange pleasantries with a machine pretending to be a person (we had chatbots for that), you didn't have to deal with AI or SEO slop or a million scrapers mirroring reddit and stackoverflow. you just thought about what you wanted to know, turned it into three or four keywords, typed "vegetable soup cooking time" or whatever into the little box, hit enter, and it would find a website, written by an actual, living breathing human, containing those words clustered near each other and you could pretty damned reliably pull up just about anything this way. if it didn't exist, the search engine didn't try to pull a convincing-looking lie out of thin air, it just said so.

@chrisisgr8 @sjolsen wait you can't? I've done it pretty recently and it was fine?

@chrisisgr8 @sjolsen I fucking hate this

@solonovamax @chrisisgr8 it's hit-and-miss. i'm sure it's an a/b testing thing but i have definitely run into the "oh it's just ignoring negation now" thing before. of course proper boolean search hasn't worked for a very long time

capitalism, ad tech specifically, and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

@sjolsen @chrisisgr8 did you do -TERM or -"TERM"? iirc I used the second one, so it might be the search engine doing smth funny with it bc it's not in quotes (bruh)

one thing I did notice though is ddg doesn't support grouping, eg. "TERM 1" ("TERM 2" OR "TERM 3")

@solonovamax @sjolsen

anyway the answer was like 45 minutes to an hour in my case

@solonovamax @sjolsen old screenshot by now but this is pretty mcuh in line with my usual ddg experience

the thing i'm learning about cooking times is that they're basically useless. the actual answer is almost always "you cook it until it's done." cooking times are good for like an order of magnitude ballpark or the occasional food where it's basically impossible to test doneness without destroying it and that's about it

@chrisisgr8 @solonovamax @sjolsen this is in line with my experience on google and ddg. i fucking hate it here. i will tell it filetype:pdf and i’ll get non pdf results sometimes

i reckon cooking time is probably actually pretty consistent for any sort of simmering process since you're pegged at 212 F, but even then you'll have variability in things like altitude and thickness

@chrisisgr8 @solonovamax @sjolsen sjolsen i genuinely feel so much this. every search feels like i am being gaslit. when opening search i actually have started getting a negative emotion i almost avoid search engines entirely. I have spent hours trying to search for one thing by moving around commas negates, booleans and everything just to give up. I hate it here.

@chrisisgr8 @solonovamax @sjolsen sometimes I will get answers quicker on fedi by just asking fedi instead of searching for myself because chances are (especially when it comes to technical stuff) someone in my orbit has experience with it already and can give me the relevant documentation. Not 300 SEO optimized stack overflow questions that have been closed as duplicate or are like “How install computer 2024???”.

@chrisisgr8 @solonovamax @sjolsen Want an example? Search “OpenZFS S3 vdev” try a bunch of combinations. Finding out the specific summit in which this was discussed & implemented, along with documentation is nearly impossible. I have only managed to find the youtube video of the summit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opW9KhjOQ3Q All of the results are “S3 vs ZFS? MINIO VS ZFS?”. This is what I mean. Knowledge is actively lost without any way of getting it back. I despise googling stuff. I will literally pull up man, github issues, anything. Literally anything else.

@chrisisgr8 @solonovamax @sjolsen Like, trying to search for obscure tech stuff has ended up with me almost crying because of how difficult it can be to sort through things. Back in the day, Hewlett Packard had memory banks and a similar implementation to a classical raid array called “raid memory” or whatever. Try searching up documentation for that, finding anything about it. Impossible.

@chrisisgr8 @solonovamax @sjolsen https://service1.pcconnection.com/PDF/AdvMemoryProtection.pdf only thing i’ve been able to find (apart from some youtube videos). A couple of years ago you could find this stuff very easily.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @sjolsen @solonovamax when i tutor i try to guide people through sifting through the vast mountains of shit as part of their skillset (ie when we need to look something up) and man there is a lot of background info you need to be able to start making sense of the state of the internet lmao

@chrisisgr8 @sjolsen @solonovamax I was born on the internet I’ve adapted every way shape and form and it’s becoming overwhelmed with noise to the point nothing works. you know, for most of these after the fact I can use something like a specialized database (think the ones used for academic papers and stuff at universities). The problem is when I am just trying to find the exact name or something to give me a lead I can’t even find that. It’s impossible.

@chrisisgr8 @puppygirlhornypost2 @solonovamax i'm suddenly struck with the realization that this is a basic skill that was taught to everyone for generations before suddenly you could just type anything into the computer: how to find information at a library. our generation i think missed out on that entirely. hopefully the cultural knowledge doesn't die out before it becomes mandatory again

@sjolsen @chrisisgr8 @puppygirlhornypost2 @solonovamax I dont think it'll die. With all our digital media, people are more curious than ever before, and they dig for the things they really want to know. No matter whether that's truth or conspiracy, they do dig.

@sjolsen @chrisisgr8 @puppygirlhornypost2 @solonovamax I take some comfort in the fact that librarians are trained professionals in finding information. Sometimes just asking an actual person for directions really is fastest

@sjolsen @chrisisgr8 @puppygirlhornypost2 @solonovamax yes, we're concerned by that as well. also, the skills that we were personally taught for finding information on physical books using physical card catalogs have been surprisingly applicable to sorting through online information.

@sjolsen @solonovamax @puppygirlhornypost2 @chrisisgr8 No worries there, the libraries died and got defunded before the knowledge died. So it's all going to shit anyway.

@sjolsen @chrisisgr8 @puppygirlhornypost2 @solonovamax

Back in the 1980s my organisation's librarian arranged for me to go on a course on how to search MEDline, a very sophisticated structured index of medical research literature. I think it was a full day. This was at a time when online access was staggering expensive per minute, so one had to carefully plan the search strategy before connecting to the system.

It was brilliant.

@sjolsen try @kagihq

@chrisisgr8 @solonovamax @sjolsen Like it has genuinely made me almost break down going insane “did i make this up” because things I KNOW I saw don’t appear anywhere. I’m so glad I have these examples off hand because it’s so fucking hard to explain to people why my job gets harder and harder every fucking day.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @sjolsen @solonovamax the fucking "no no no no no no no heres what we're definitely sure you actually wanted, really" when you're trying to find obscure information

@puppygirlhornypost2 @chrisisgr8 @sjolsen @solonovamax this is because #SearchEngines like #Google are deliberately #enshittifiying the experienve because it makes #KPI like "screen time per visitor" and "average clicks / pageloads per visitor" go up so they can shove more #ads onto the #SearchResults!

@puppygirlhornypost2 @chrisisgr8 @sjolsen @solonovamax Part of this is probably the move to just stop indexing some stuff that's out there because they think nobody cares about finding it

@Forbearance @puppygirlhornypost2 @chrisisgr8 @sjolsen @solonovamax and the general #Enshittification!
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113710599527200528

@chrisisgr8 @puppygirlhornypost2 @sjolsen @solonovamax yeah...

#DuckDuckGo without #Bangs is unuseable, Google has been unuseable for over a decade and I'm swithing over to @monocles / #monoclesSearch:

https://monocles.eu
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/113710599527200528