"We've ignored all the meaningful terms you were searching for. Now here's a bunch of pinterest and quora spam."
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Half the time I look at a website or article it is just AI generated crap anyway. Oh you want a product review? Here are a half dozen articles that have summarised the Amazon reviews of an item, with no first hand experience.
Google "Best vacuum cleaner"
Top 6 hits: "We evaluated the 5 brands that paid us the most and found that they all suck up your dirt. We can't really speak ill of any of them because this is an ad and we signed a contract. Please use our embedded links so we can have more money."
What's worse is most of what comes up isn't even a hands on review, it's literally someone doing what I just did, which is type "vacuum cleaner" into Amazon and see what came up. Then they give it reviews based on the bullshit in the description.
I want a review from someone who sees these everyday and has a deep hatred of every vacuum in existence. He's the one who knows that such and such used to be good until they replaced this part with plastic because they have a new CEO, and now it's no better than a dirt devil.
At least with vacuums however, there's a few guys out there with carpet swathes, children, and dogs at home that get to take vacuums from work and do youtube tests with them. Unfortunately they usually don't try to game the algorithm so they're pretty deep in there.
Search engine protocol:
Ignore first few results (ads)
Ignore next few results (bullshit spam comparison farms)
Ignore really annoying site you think is ok but is a usability nightmare
Ignore subsection of reddit links
Find 0-1 useful links on first page
Regret
The sad thing is the Reddit Links probably contain the most useful answers that google will show you
I know. But I'll use them as a last resort
Use them, costs bandwidth and CPU cycles.
Yes but it will be offset by traffic boosts for advertisers
Use an adblocker. Unless, you mean people go on the internet without using protection?
They do. Either due to technical ineptitude (like approximately everyone's parents) or, and that might be worse, with the conviction of doing "the right thing," like a friend of mine.
Junk data that costs the advertisement without a return on investment
I swear sometimes it feels like a superpower to have grown up in the 90s and learned the ground rules for multiple OSes, search tools, and file systems - the descendants of which are nearly all still in use today.
I defer of course to any oldheads who can still bang out a long .bat file or compile and configure Linux; I just mean it's a very useful quirk of the era that skills learned on windows 3.1 or OSX are still broadly applicable, even in fields where 'using the computer' is a minor task of one's workday.
I agree so much. It feels like I "understand" how a computer talks and interacts as opposed to most people I work with just learn processes by heart and have no clue what to do once their process breaks.
The internet is unsearchable at this point. I feel like 99% of websites are fronts.
What's been pissing me off for years now is googling a specific company and getting a wall of advertisements for their competitors first. So. Dirty.
It really winds me up how results that match every search term aren't prioritised any more. I often search for very specific pieces of hardware, and it's been a nightmare since the late 2010s. You now have to pore over each result to check that it's 100% what you're are looking for.
SEO exacerbates the problem, but I'd say the root cause is the algorithm itself.
Have you tried putting your search between " " ? It usually helps improve my results.
Thought I'd add for people that may not know, the quotes mean exact match for what's between the quotes and only give results if it includes that term (unless I mixed something up). Whenever you click on Google's 'must include' it puts quotes around the term. Can be handy or make things worse depending what you're looking for. Worse is while programming and tracking a specific issue, unless they used the exact words you won't get a result. Better for part numbers if they never get changed.
Been awhile since I went into the nitty gritty of the searching functions so if this is incorrect please reply with the correct info, been awhile since I really had to think about what quotes does behind the scenes.
That used to work, but these days seems to do little other than sightly change the order of the same useless results.
What are "SEO spam tactics"? I would google, but am afraid of that now.
I think I just figured it out, Search Engine Optimization?
Yes. Google popularized it and now it has ruined Google search.
Once AI is handling search for us, many may never learn the concept of "search term"
"AI" is already handling the search for you. The big search engines are probably the first mass scale adopters of machine learning.
And they have lost the war with SEO spam to a hilarious extent. What makes you think the same won't happen with chat bot AIs? Bad actors (including PR agencies) will inevitably figure out where and how to spam comments in order to bias the AI models in favor of their agendas or products.
If the data they consume is filled with something like "fossil fuels don't cause global warming because XYZ", the chat bots will repeat it. They don't have the capacity to reason.
There hasn't been a reason to flood the internet with low effort spam because it's easily detected by humans who read it. But the ML algorithms will be a lot easier to trick.
Injecting stuff into the data consumed by LLMs is the new type of SEO.
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