I just go the official docs even if their old and then switch to the latest version once I’m on the website. Most of the software I use has easy index to switch between versions.
So many SEO trick to put yourselves into top google search for traffic.
I have google for bug and stuff, and most common bug can be found on shitty content Java tip page with broken format, lot of ads, and sometime untrue/outdate information.
We need a human-curated Internet search. A wiki of good web content.
That is (was) DMOZ: the Mozilla Directory of websites, now curlie.org, after AOL shut it down in 2017.
They have a Patreon if you want to help them maintain it.
The return of web directories 🤩 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_directory
Back to 90s internet you say?
Please.
Maybe web rings are due for a comeback.
I forgot how this worked until I discovered NeoCities. I suddenly remenbered when so many personal websites would have some page that’s like “links” or “sites I love” or “other cool people”, etc. And it was just a curated list of sites the author thought were neat.
And your bookmark function was actually really helpful, because “web surfing” was literally jumping from link to link to link, following rabbitholes and breadcrumb trails across the web.
Nowadays, I bookmark things but I never go back through them. I know Firefox sometimes automatically helps you remember stuff in your bookmarks though.
But there was a time when it felt like finding some niche site was a sort of secret club or cool treasure, and you had to make sure you could find your way back. :)
When you didn’t make the bookmark, you were basically trying to backtrack which links you followed and what sites you visited to get back to that one website.
Totally! And I loved those neat little animated web badges that became really popular, especially on forums.
I still have those on one of the forums I occasionally still visit, but it might disappear soon after nearly 2 and a half decades.
Solution is simple; don’t use Google I use a SearXNG instance 🙃
Some of this is just because some of these frameworks and technologies have been around for a while and they iterate frequently. I see a ton of Azure content that is obsolete after only a few years.
I get quite a bit of flak from my colleagues for paying for search, but I kid you not, I don’t regret splurging on a Kagi subscription at all. It’s personally less stressful for me, having to wade through less cruft, and I think I even work significantly faster because of how I use it.
It’s sad when you think about it. Search was such a good experience in the past.
I also pay for Kagi and I’m super happy with that decision. I do wish they’d stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.
I definitely feel the pain when it comes to worthless results nowadays. Though in this case DDG comes through:
Adding documentation to the search makes the “correct” page soar to the top:
Google is better as a verb than a search engine.
I use “search” as a verb
Kagi only lists postgresql.org for the first 10 entries, but outdated ones in first place. With the programming scope it collapses all official do s entries to one, with GH and SO filling the rest.
For the quick answer, it also uses the ‘outdated’ docs as source, but as it only gives a very shallow overview there shouldn’t be any difference in version (i.e. it checks for a value in a list in all versions the same, and quick answer leaves out details specific to different versions)
Haha, nope. The links points to a table of contents after which you are on your own. The right link should point to a specific page instead, but the problem here is that postres docs are poorly optimized for search engines. If you click on the top link from google, you would see there’s a notice that the page is outdated, with a link to a current version, but said link is dead. It’s not an issue I’ve ever experienced with mysql docs for example.
And yes, w3schools, despite how terrible it is, is still above the official docs because it is more popular with newbies. I remember a time when I just started, I preferred sites like it, because they were simple and on point, rather than technically correct and comprehensive like the official docs are. If you forgot the feeling, try learning math on wikipedia (assuming you don’t have a math degree).
For the rest I cannot argue. Generated/AI shit is indeed ruining the internet and search engines giving up and joining them isn’t helpful either.
Trying to learn math on Wikipedia is an endless Sisyphean nightmare just trying to understand the first word in an unfamiliar vocabulary.
After which ctrl+f " in" takes you to the correct chapters. I do agree that a direct link would be more helpful.
And for learning postgresql I agree it isn’t very helpful - using their tutorial links, w3schools or something like udemy if you prefer video format is the way to go in that use case.I remember back when you were told to learn to work with the documentation, not memorize it, because you will always have access to it as a reference. Maybe bookmarking reference books/documentation will make a come back as the search engines degrade.
Surely the word ‘in’ would appear countless times out of context on the table of contents.
" in" appears 25 times on the page to be exact, with 16 of those being in the table of contents and 9 being in the text afterwards.
“in” appears 54 times, as you know end up hitting “string” and so on.Had I known that the functions table of contents was as short as it is I would probably have just scrolled.
This is partly why I prefer Firefox’s implementation of the find feature - it allows case-sensitive search while Chrome does not support it.
You can press alt-w though to only show full word matches
It would be funny, if it weren’t painfully true. DuckDuckGo sucks just as bad as Google. I hear there is a good search engine, but it costs money to use. Shocking. Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
Do you expect free services with no catch? You either pay with money or with something else
You literally sent that from a FOSS platform…
I give lemmy money. Not so for google
You don’t have to give either money and there is the option to give both money.
Someone has to pay lemmy. If you don’t, it’s comparable to a free tier of a paid service. When I say “you” I don’t mean every single person. There’s no option to pay for google search that I’m aware of.
Not true because we’re getting the same experience whether we pay or not. The same kinda goes for google, they have other services you could pay to support them (please don’t), and it won’t make the search engine better. Big difference is one of them is actually free (full meaning of the word) and the other one is just usable without paying.
You’re still using a free platform to say good free software is not a thing tho, kinda weird.
Nobody has to pay for anything Lemmy or ActivityPub related because its FOSS.
That means Free Open Source Software.
As in, you can get and use the source code yourself without paying a single cent.
may I ask what it is?
Not the one you replied to but they’re probably talking about Kagi. I crunched the numbers a while back and the higher tiers were kind of hard to make worthwhile, however iirc they simplified the pricing slightly since then.
Oh yeah, I heard about this. Is it rly that much better?
I’ve been using it for a few months. It’s good. I get the official docs for my first result using OP’s query. 300 queries, their starting tier was not enough for my use. I was using DDG before and like it well enough. I’m not sure if it’s worth it but I like the idea of paying for services I use. I stopped using Google years ago because of all the captchas I had to fill due to my VPN
I’m cool with paying for quality, ad-free service but I feel like they’re giving way too little for what they’re asking. 300 searches a month? What is this AOL?
Wait until you see the AI generated blog posts being top results…
There has been something similar for years: a page that basically says “Yeah, nah, we don’t have any information for that, but you might be interested in a totally irrelevant something else”, but phrased in a way that gets it high in the results. What’s astonishing is that Google doesn’t punish those pages.
Why would they punish pages that help them serve more ads? There are ads on the search, ads on the useless result, ads when you refine the query.
Yeah, you have a point, but then it’s a bit hypocritical of them to even have criteria for putting pages up in the results.
The worse part, you enter the blog, it looks legitimate enough at a glance, go straight to the code, then find out it’s bullshit.
We need ai blog blockers now…
For certain languages and frameworks, LLMs are horrible right now because of this. Many answers I get are a Frankenstein of different versions.
Hah!
No.
Soon enough the result will be an AI generated “blogpost”, generated by the search engine, in response to your query.
I’m sure all this nonsense waste of energy is exactly what we needed just to stop climate change.
That’s already been happening for about a month now… perhaps only for some users? Often the AI results are straight up lies.
I’ve seen some fucking hilariously wrong AI math.
It showed up for me about a month ago. I put up with it for about a week and then broke down and finally switched all my browser search engines to duckduckgo.
The funny thing is, I tried making this same switch a couple years ago. I legitimately had a harder time getting the results I needed and ended up switching back to Google.
Google is worse than useless to me now.
I was looking up some tips for Baldurs Gate missions and these fking AI generated pieces of shit with hallucinated fake playthroughs ruined the whole experience.
Huh, thats weird. Your chatgpt output looks just like a google result page.
Well internet enshitification is real…
You are confusing Google and Internet… they are very different things.
It’s not just google, google is just the most popular, so a lot of the seo is targeted for it
Judging by Google’s chokehold over web browsers and websites in general, they’re not that different…
You’re confusing the web with the internet. But I don’t blame you because OP did that too.
Doesn’t mean the statement is less true, the enshitification of google is a symptom, the disease is the internet as a whole. Google and LLMs screwing the web, M$ screwing windows, Apple’s existence by itself, Meta monopolizing and screwing social media, and don’t get me started with streaming platforms and other media industries are all symtoms.
Considering all of that, yes, the internet enshitification is very real.
Symptoms of what?
But anyway, the cool thing about the internet is that you can find your nice cozy niche and stay there.
That’s how the 90s internet was. If the megacorps want to be in here, fine. I’ll just stay in Lemmy. And when Lemmy starts sucking, I’ll move to somewhere else.
i wonder how much effort would it take to index all official documentation pages & stackoverflow, and push it into one big search engine
On duckduckgo it was only the the 4th result! Pretty decent.
Had to test with Kagi also, leads with official documentation, after that tutorials and unofficial things. Nothing obviously irrelevant. The only thing with the Kagi results, was that there were a few very simmilar official documentation links (for different postgresql versions) at top. But, still good search results. Not sure why anyone is still using google, when there are quite a few better alternatives availale
The power of defaults, comfort, not wanting to pay, and probably worse non English results
I only use it for web stuff but W3Schools is usually pretty solid so I wouldn’t be mad having that as a first result.
Funny, we all used to avoid W3Schools because it was a heavily SEO’d ad farm, but nowadays it’s actually a Web 2.0 oasis in a hellscape of infinite scrolling AI bullshit. I’ve found myself using it over SO since their surrender to OpenAI.
Web 2.0 oasis
💀
Works alright for me. Maybe Google is bad just in the US?
Can’t tell if you’re joking. The first three aren’t even the official docs and the official doc links are to an incredibly old version.
Note the versions, none of the results give you the official operators page for the current version, 16. They give 9, which went EOL in 2021.
