Google is dead. Long live Google + “site:reddit.com”

There is some kind of requirement to add that javascript to all public-facing gov’t websites.

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Thanks for the info. Nothing personal, but I refuse to click “like” on that.

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For now…

AI will close this loophole in… wait, already closed…

If only reddit weren’t a place that had made the conscious choice to harbor those who want to openly discuss bigotry and hatred, perhaps I would still have an account there.

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that is true stephen colbert GIF by Obama

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It kind of amazes me that you can see advertisements for SEO services all over the 'net, from sites that wouldn’t dream of advertising a botnet fueled spamhouse.

Yeah. I find Reddit is great if you want the opinions of (mostly American) teenage boys.

I’m not sure what kinds of things the author was searching for, but I generally have no problems with Google. The odd SEO spam shows up in the results but generally I find what I want.

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I also don’t have much problems searching on Google. I think a lot of people just don’t know how to search, they just punch in the words and boggle at the cacophony they inevitably get.

When I search for something I try to be as precise as possible. “phrase” or even just “word”. -“phrase” is a must much of the time to cut down on the noise, -“Pinterest” is the first thing I add to any image or recipe search. On Chromium browsers (but most other browsers as well) you can add search engines for specific websites like Reddit or Wikipedia without adding “site:whatever”. And so on.

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Alternatively: switch your default search engine to duck duck go.

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I saw

Long live Google +

in the title and had a sudden intake of breath

In my experience searching has always been a game of keywords, phrases, and many attempts. Still sore that “+” is no longer an operator.

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Indeed! “honest discussions” is a strange way to write “full on flame wars about the most pointless minutiae”

And I say this as someone who lived in the heady days of the heyday of net news groups and IRC back in the 90’s

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What is a DKB :confused:

uBlock Origin is our friend

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The absolute dumpster fire of search engine uses is reverse phone lookup. Maybe it’s because 99% of calls are now spoofed spam numbers, but there used to be at least semi-functional reverse lookups. Now it’s just spam and random pages listing every number in a range. Today I got an unknown number that called my office landline then my cellphone a minute later so was almost certainly someone actually trying to contact me, but they didn’t leave a message and reverse lookup is useless.

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Right? It pisses me off when I put a search string in quotes and the search engine still decides it knows better than me and tries to “optimize” my search.

I’m like motherfucker I told you exactly what I wanted to search for and even put it in quotes - don’t presume to know better than me and mess around with my query or don’t give me precisely matching results. Bing is especially bad about this.

This is especially aggravating when trying to do highly technical searches when I really want exactly what I am searching for, or nothing at all if there’s really no exact matches.

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I instinctively asked myself “people still use Google?”, a question so absurd that I had to instantly reality-check myself. Yes, me, most people still use Google. Most people use Facebook and Twitter. Most people don’t use adblockers on their browser and many don’t even realize they exist. It’s a barbaric landscape out there.

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“DKB says”.

Wait, who is DKB? I’m missing a big point of the ethos of this argument.

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Don’t Know, Bro.

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Exactly. Reddit is trash and far from offering useful information only results in either discussions five years out of date or your typical threads on why you should never have asked the question in the first place. I specifically remove Reddit from my searches.

I will have to read the essay to see how such a flat earth argument presents itself but no, Reddit has never, ever once helped me in decades of searches. It’s populated by the uneducated but opinionated and the emotionally immature and quite literally its only appeal, as you can even see among its membership, is as an exploration of how stupid people can be.

I’m selfishly OK with that.

If everyone used adblockers, advertisers would find a different way to embed their crappy javascript in such a way that it would be somewhat harder to identify and isolate, making the job of adblocking even harder than it is today.

As it stands today, relatively few of us use adblockers. While our existence may annoy the advertisers, they realize they don’t have much to gain by rewriting how the advertising web works just to deliver us their unwanted shit. Plus, if we have to block their newest schemes it becomes exponentially harder to stop adblocking, and built-in adblocking will become easier for the masses. So they won’t stir the pot if we don’t.

But I have to admit I feel a tiny bit sad for anyone who browses the web without an adblocker. God, what a shit-show.

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