Re:How SEO Ruined the Internet
by userbinator on Monday April 06, 2020 @09:29PM
(#22799572)
- Error messages
- Error codes
- IC part numbers
Those are the top 3 things that routinely yield absolutely no useful results for me. The first two seem to produce pages upon pages of spammy SEO sites (with titles like "fix errors now") which don't even contain the relevant error message or code, and the latter alternates between no results or, once again, pages of SEO spam.
When I was still in an office with coworkers a while back, we had developed the habit of yelling "fuck you Google!" and showing a middle finger at the monitor whenever a search yielded absolutely WTF or useless results, which was a cue to everyone else around to jump in and help. A stronger tirade of profanity was reserved for when someone managed to trip the bot-detector CAPTCHA hellban. At first only the former happened once or twice a week, but shortly before working from home, we were getting Google-screwed multiple times a day, and tripping the hellban so often that most of us switched to a combination of Bing and Yahoo; while still not ideal, and the results weren't much better, at least we weren't routinely getting banned from them for trying harder to find what we were looking for.
When I was still in an office with coworkers a while back, we had developed the habit of yelling "fuck you Google!" and showing a middle finger at the monitor whenever a search yielded absolutely WTF or useless results, which was a cue to everyone else around to jump in and help. A stronger tirade of profanity was reserved for when someone managed to trip the bot-detector CAPTCHA hellban. At first only the former happened once or twice a week, but shortly before working from home, we were getting Google-screwed multiple times a day, and tripping the hellban so often that most of us switched to a combination of Bing and Yahoo; while still not ideal, and the results weren't much better, at least we weren't routinely getting banned from them for trying harder to find what we were looking for.