The Verge shows how Google search is useless

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.

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

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.

_{Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)}

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.

It worked, SEO really sucks.

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?

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.

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

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.

you are a printer we are all printers

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.

Omg I can't believe they used AI to write this article 😡

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.

Kagi

Paying for search aligns incentives better than free search.

It's also the best results from a search engine I've had in a decade.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.

Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!

Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one.

Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.

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.

Brother laser printers are strong contenders, especially for black and white printing needs, but weigh the pros and cons against other options like inkjets before deciding.

The original article contains 428 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I don't think Google can be blamed too much for presenting an article from a relevant, generally trustworthy site, that has the search query as the article title.