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The Toilet Theory of the Internet: Google is serving an audience that wants quick and easy results. That may lead to disaster. (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 6 months ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] li10@feddit.uk 131 points 6 months ago (3 children)

The results aren’t easy when they’re useless tho.

Particularly an issue when you’re googling an obscure software issue, you just get spammed with the same copy/paste “troubleshooting” steps. Which usually boil down to “reinstall this completely unrelated driver”.

[–] Lojcs@lemm.ee 33 points 6 months ago (1 children)

One of the biggest advantages of using Linux over windows is the lack of those endless seo sites while troubleshooting.

[–] RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.world 50 points 6 months ago (1 children)

oh, they're there and they're just as useless. I'm the kind of person who refuses to remember things so I have been using google search to take me to the particular website which contains that one liner which I know fixes my issue. For the past 4 years or so, I started actually remembering a lot of things because it's impossible to get to those pages through all the spam.

A search for a specific question used to take me to a stack overflow page with that specific wording to which the answer was the specific command and a description of what it does. Now not only does google ignore half the search terms, but the first 5 results are crap websites with a long description which seems to be close to what i'm looking for only to prove to be useless 3 minutes in.

[–] Anti_Iridium@lemmy.world 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I was once searching Native-American in quotes and was getting Indian Ocean as a result.

Edit: I was searching for statistics on electrification of the reservations during the 1960's. It may have been "Indian" with

-ocean

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

Gotta turn on "verbatim mode"

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 15 points 6 months ago

…along with everything else. After all, if you reinstall everything from scratch the problem will maybe go away or you get too tired to go on

[–] Cheskaz@lemmy.world 11 points 6 months ago

Particularly an issue when you’re googling an obscure software issue, you just get spammed with the same copy/paste “troubleshooting” steps. Which usually boil down to “reinstall this completely unrelated driver”.

Just reading this caused a small spike of ice cold fury within my soul