It'll be a very hard habit to break, but it's finally time for me to give up google. Their search has finally become as ad-infested, functionally-retarded, and product-biased as the fly-by-night operations they displaced ten years ago. It finds nothing obscure, few things I'm really looking for, and mostly just things they were paid to show me. Ask Jeeves was better.
They've run out of goodwill, ideas, and promises to break. I've run out of patience and apathy. I'm sure they'll miss me. Not.
There's also Startpage, Searx.me, and Qwant. I just have them all in my settings and change the default every now and again. And if I'm looking for something really hard to find, I can just search them all.
Someone in my house watches a lot of nature videos on YouTube. Nature videos find their way into my YouTube suggestions. YouTube, being part of Google, makes this icky, but not surprising.
Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir
Someone else in my household watches a TV show.
Now Google is telling me that there's a new episode of this TV show tonight. Even though I don't watch it and am not interested in it.
Seems kinda creepy.
This is indeed creepy and I'm surprised I'm actually surprised.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
I'm looking for one which will give me results about the question I asked. And if there are no results, say that. Google, Yahoo, Bing all infuriate me. I asked Google for an artist named Saulnier. The answer was did you mean Sony? and gave me a lot of Sony crap. Once I asked Bing for information on the Imperial Japanese Army of WW1. Nearly all the answers were about the Imperial Japanese Navy of WW2. I ask about one thing, and get loads of things about some else.
Duckduckgo doesn't seem better than google in that regard. Especially if you ask for anything even slightly like a product name, the floodgates open wide for what look like "sponsored results".
I wonder what the status of the search-engine vs spammer arms race is and to what degree these results are intended/paid for, vs "looking the other way" when their ranking is abused, vs someone actively subverting their ranking mechanism and duckduckgo's programmers pulling their hair out.
Google used to keep the fulltext of every page, nearly, so you could hunt for important words and exclude important words. They clearly don't any more, and just keep some sort of weighted ranking like everyone else.
Widely adopted things tend to get optimized for the lowest common denominator, and over time, that level of optimization becomes the new norm, and the cycle continues like that until I guess we all drown in puddles.
Plus, most web traffic is coming from mobile devices, using voice recognition or on-screen keyboards, so you get more misspellings and less precision, and people get dependent on spellchecking and prediction.
So it gets to the point where it's a good bet that someone searching for a specific but uncommon term actually meant some other, stupider thing.
Google remembers everything about you, in order to try to sell you stuff. Google probably already knows that you mostly use a real keyboard, search for specific stuff, and don't follow its 'nearby' suggestions. If it thought it could sell you more stuff by only giving accurate filtered responses to your specific searches, then it would do that. Rightly or wrongly Google (or the advertisers that pay Google) must think there's no money to be made that way.
Haha yeah fuck those fake stadia gamers, as a real gamer I love paying $60 for a beta and another $500 in micro transactions before the dev team is reassigned and the game wound down for not making its inflated target.
Oh wait, shit, thats how it will be no matter how Stadia does. The gaming industry is broken.
I'm not going to pretend to understand how Stadia works. I don't know how the heavy lifting of the video processing is going to happen.
If these doofuses are already crying about data caps then they should have been crying months ago because of video streaming services. Whatever games Stadia has shouldn't be much more data intensive than that.
I'm not saying it isn't a legitimate concern. Just that it's about the same as any other internet based leisure activity they're already heavily indebted to.
Knowing a bit about the gambling industry, I mean the lootbox industry, I mean the pay or grind industry, er ok the gaming industry makes it a great accidental reverse burn on penny arcade.