this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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If it's so difficult, then why was Google able to find the answer to questions exactly like this 6+ years ago?
That was why everyone switched to Google. The search engine just worked.
And frankly a large portion of your post is just incorrect. What you've described is how a very bad programmer would build a search engine. It's overly complicated and requires too much data.
curious if there is any way to know for sure if this is the case? is there documentation of vague google searches over time to track their results? sort of seems like a "don't know what you got til it's gone" sort of thing for the average user. but maybe there is some academic work or industry publications to this effect?
We do have a good 10-20 years of every news story intro containing a line like "a google search for 'spatula' returns 2.5million results". remember when journalists and other writers thought that just putting a single search term into a search engine was the way to conduct online research?
otherwise it is really just your recollection how it felt then vs now. i can't comment on @merc@sh.itjust.works's programing skills but the point about changing expectations is a good one. not to mention that the amount of available data has exploded.
I doubt there's any way to tell. Google probably has "search quality" phrases that they plug into it to track their quality over time, but those are probably secret, and most of them are probably not vague searches that you wouldn't expect to work.
I really doubt Google was able to do this 6+ years ago. From what I remember, 6+ years ago, we were still trying to use specific words or phrases we expected to see on the page we wanted to find, or at least phrases we expected to see on pages that linked to the page we wanted to see.
Exactly, this is some of the weirdest gushing i ever seen for a product that is at the worse state it's been in decades.
This is why at work I just use Bing and edge, slightly better results, and you can say things like "I just binged that and now I am edging so hard right now" to your coworker
Wait how are u pronouncing binged
bing does NOT have slightly better results
I love how readily people are to say shit like "bad programmer". I bet most the time the person saying it is either not even a "programmer" or is so average they feel the need to belittle others.
Who even uses the word "programmer" to describe a contemporary software engineer anyway? I don't think that job really exists anymore.