this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
957 points (91.4% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35904 readers
1593 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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
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.