I think FB is probably the only option they know about. Entire services like SquareSpace exist to make this as easy as possible, but people don’t use that either. It’s not exactly a tech-savvy group, as a rule.
Hilariously though, my internet service in this tiny town hours from nowhere is 1000x better than I had in Los Angeles. Thanks to Canadian Socialism, I have a fibre optic line running right into my house, with a full gigabit up and down, and it costs less than a third of what I paid for shitty asymmetrical monopoly cable in LA. I couldn’t even get internet this good at any price in Los Angeles. People here have no idea how good we have it. And they don’t build websites.
Oh I know they do, but that was part of my point- I’m in a different country thousands of miles away from when I last touched FB. They still know roughly who I am. The suggestions aren’t perfect, like they don’t suggest old friends from my old friend list when I still used it. But the suggestions are shockingly reasonable for an account with 100% fake information on it. Like, it has suggested my late mom’s old friends, and a couple members of my distant extended family. But not my dad who uses FB a lot, so it doesn’t know exactly who I am. Really weird.
I think the way Google deprecates real sites from small businesses in favour of SEO chum aggregators/intermediaries/review sites must be a factor in this. If I use Google to find a restaurant menu I am going to find Zomato pages (what even is that? I’ve never clicked on it) Tripadvisor, delivery services, Google’s own scraped text etc. At least a business gets a better chance with Facebook.
Google maps is also hilariously wrong in many places that it knows about and flat out refuses to fix.
They are a really shitty company when it comes to accuracy of data throughout their businesses.
Your point is well made and I agree that’s a huge problem generally. I don’t think it’s a factor for small town restaurants and the like who aren’t exactly running the numbers in their SEO analytics tools at night.
These are the kinds of places that don’t show up in aggregators because there are no reviews or anything online about them.
One of the big lessons of moving to a very small town is that small towns are simply not online. People in places like this don’t care about the commercial internet the way cities do. FB’s barrier to entry is so low that a few will use that, but even there it’s often cursory. Like, the landscaper who came and fixed my sprinkler system has a Facebook page that he hasn’t updated in four years and the phone number on it is wrong. I got the correct one from my HVAC guy who knows him. That’s how things work in places like this.
Back to Google being garbage though, the thing that is killing me right now is the AI-generated trash sites. I Google a lot of technical things for my retirement gig, and technical searches are totally overrun with fake AI-generated sites. The top five or six things will all be garbage sites playing SEO games with AI-generated copy that isn’t really correct in the answers it gives. Google promotes all of these above real sites. It’s crazy making. I need to switch to DDG, maybe. Google is becoming useless.
For example, if you Google “python for loop with step increment”, it used to be that the top hit would be the official python documentation, and below that would stackoverflow, then there’d be three or four well-established python tutorial sites. Now? The top five are all trash sites trying to sound like tutorials, the python docs are nowhere to be found, stackoverflow will be somewhere on page two, and an actual reputable tutorial site might be in the top ten if you’re lucky. It’s so so bad now.
Yep. I know we’re getting off topic, but so many places in the US have such crappy internet, and so many people here don’t know how much better it is in so much of the world. “Best country ever!!!”
When I moved into a new build house in a new estate, the Royal Mail activated the postcode so I could receive letters. It took Google Maps a year to update their database from the Royal Mail database. I had to give delivery companies the postcode of the other side of the road – developed much earlier – and additional instructions.
Most of the results there were stackoverflow which is fine by me, among a few other not-terrible tutorial sites. My searches do return official documentation depending on the wording. Most obviously including the word documentation, like “python for loop documentation,” which returns docs.python.org on top. And it should work identically on your end since Duck doesn’t try to tailor its results based on past searches!
doesn’t Elon know you can’t serve ads on views that aren’t happening?" isn’t realizing that he doesn’t really care. The new reality that media folks can’t quite adapt to is that Twitter is now Elon Musk’s personal website.
Sure, but we can’t read his personal posts while rate limited either.
Both are run by CEOs that don’t value the people reading or posting on them, but Reddit hasn’t fired most of its tech staff. So either could fail based on user revolt, but Twitter could additionally fail by not actually working. So I give Twitter the edge here in chances of failure. Deserving of failure though I say it is a tie.
He is a short sighted prick with ego problems and a sense of entitlement that dwarfs most people’s, but he does occasionally stumble across goals that are actually good for people in general (making EVs popular in the long run will significantly reduce CO2 and maybe other forms of pollution). I use to believe he actually cared about the environment, but it seems likely he just cared about how that made him sound, or more likely how sounding like he cared improved chances if business success.
So I think never is very slightly overstating it. However if you require both good acts and good intent I’ll give you “never” being a high probability!
Some people learn “everything is ligitabatable” lesson without learning “but sometimes they are nearly impossible to defend”
The top three hits are AI generated shovelware sites with the wrong answers to this question. The fourth hit is StackOverflow, so okay. Then below the one legit hit:
There are nine more (five shown) AI generated garbage sites. Below that is a fucking pintrest hit for crying out loud, followed by eleven more AI generated sites, and not a single legit documentation or tutorial site in there. The actual Python documentation is nowhere in the results.
What the actual fuck, Google. What are you even doing. DDG, here I come.
Edit: just did the exact same search on DDG, and the first 20 hits are legit StackOverflow results. The top has a breakout box with the correct answer in it. There was one AI site down around hit #10 but it was obvious because it was surrounded by legit results. Wow, what a difference. I’ve been like a frog in a boiling pot on Google. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. Okay we’re off topic here, sorry for the derail.
The interns at work reject google search outright when looking for anything that involves instruction. They do lookups via YouTube now, which is still Google but wearing a different hat.
As an academic librarian Google keeps me employed. I never run out of examples for the students of how it does you wrong. Basically type in any first year assignment and the top page will be chum.
No. You are doing a public service in documenting your move away from Google. I stopped using it years ago because it is terrible at search. Hopefully you willl inspire others and its death spiral will begin.
I will never understand how anyone could prefer a video tutorial over text, especially for something like programming. Having to scrub through a video instead of skimming a text seems like a nightmare to me. But to each their own, and this is definitely one of those things that remind me that I’m not considered young anymore.
I loathe trying to squeeze information out of a YT video. Occasionally a technical search will force me to do so because no written sources seem to have the information I want. Oh god it’s awful. YT is great for entertainment and general learning, but when there is one very specific piece of information you need, it’s awful. Even if you know the information is in that video it’s bad, but even worse is that it may not be and you’ll waste 20 minutes for nothing.
Sometimes, when diving into a new language or framework from scratch, I find it’s better to follow along a tutorial, pausing and repeating the steps myself, when I want to really know it in my fingers.
Watch out for some channels that are tutorial factories. They churn out endless tutorials for all the variations of language and frameworks, and they don’t always know what they’re doing. (I’m starting to wonder if they’re using AI to generate the code.)
One Fastapi series abruptly ended in the middle, and was starting to duplicate API code to generate HTML pages. (“No no no! Never duplicate code you a-hole! It’s a maintenance nightmare! You should be calling your own API to get the data to make the HTML, but you obviously don’t know how! Thanks for wasting my time, skull, poison, dagger, gun, noose!” )
In the example of these interns I think they’re annoyed with Google giving wrong answers. Also they’re looking up how to use NX, Matlab and Jira where the source documentation is insufficient or assumes a certain base level of proficiency.
This is 100% the case for text-based programming tutorials. See above for the 90% of Google results that are this. As you say, the problem is they are riddled with misinformation (and you have to put up with insane ad density to try and parse said bad information)
The code and explanations weren’t wrong, until it went skew at the end. It’d seemed odd that a human would do that, but thinking back, it’s as if they hit the limit of what they could coax out of an LLM, especially with Fastapi being a newer framework with few examples for the LLM to crib from.
I’ll definitely give DDG a try, because using Google to find a simple code example is pathetic.
eta: Oh yeah! That’s so much better without all the crud!
