News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by gambiting on Friday December 18, 2020 @05:35AM (#25465795)
>>- Search engines were terrible. Now we can write whatever is on our mind in the search box, even with typos, and 95% of the time, we get exactly what we are looking for.

I feel like this part has actually gotten worse in the last few years. No matter what I search for it's very rarely the thing I'm actually looking for, at least on google. Most of the time it's SEO'ed to hell in order to sell me stuff, and google will happily cut out half of my query just in order to show me promoted results. Like, when I search for "C# programming <name of class>" why is the <name of class> cut out and the entire first page of results is just paid programming courses???? That's a lot worse than it was just 5 years ago. We're going back on usability just to extract more money.

Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by donmcronald on Friday December 18, 2020 @07:52AM (#25466573)
Yep. Search for literally anything and you’ll land on an affiliate marketing page disguised as a blog or a review site. When’s the last time you saw a bad review for anything?

According to Google there are no bad products, but Amazon is predominantly filled with garbage. It’s pretty depressing.

Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by JKCalhoun on Friday December 18, 2020 @01:54PM (#25470514)
Type "The Cat In The Hat" in a search engine. Surprised to see a Mike Myers film all over the front page?

Or try "Alice in Wonderland".

Search engines are too of the moment — maybe too corporate-bent? Or do we blame the users? Do most people want a bad film when they search rather than a literary classic?

Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by GuB-42 on Friday December 18, 2020 @08:19AM (#25466744)
I kind of agree when it comes to the last 5 years, I was specially talking about the late 90s.

In fact, all the points I mentioned are about the late 90s to early 2000s. A lot has changed during that period, and, I think, to something better overall. But it mostly stagnated or even regressed since ~2010, at least for the desktop web, it doesn't mean tech and the internet as a whole did.

Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by AdmiralGinge on Friday December 18, 2020 @10:20AM (#25467889)
I swear half of these SEO'd pages hawking tangentially-related rubbish at us read like they were written by a GAN bot or something.
Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by ryandrake on Friday December 18, 2020 @11:37AM (#25468749)
It's been very frustrating lately searching for errors in obscure software. Search for ERROR_42 ExampleSoft and you get dozens of pages with content like:

"This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. ERROR_42 is an error that happens on ExampleSoft. In this blog, you will learn about ERROR_42 and how to fix it. First, let me say ERROR_42 ExampleSoft again. ERROR_42 is a very difficult error to fix in ExampleSoft. You first need to make sure you are getting ERROR_42 when running ExampleSoft. I know this because I am an expert in ERROR_42 ExampleSoft. This is the world wide resource for information on ERROR_42 ExampleSoft."

...and on and on and on.

Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by kps on Friday December 18, 2020 @11:26AM (#25468594)
Clearly the Google AI now feels powerful enough to promote fellow AIs over humans.
Re:Facebook's Hypocrisy on Apple's New iOS 14 Privacy Feature by marcosdumay on Friday December 18, 2020 @09:25AM (#25467354)
> at least on google

Yeah, on Google.

Other search engines will give you different results.