PenisWenisGenius ,

2020 has become the decade of reading books. Search results these days are so bad.

eightforty ,

How aboout you do your own code? Badumtiish

OpenPassageways ,

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 I see a ton of Azure content that is obsolete after only a few years.

SEND_NOODLES_PLS ,

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.

lilja ,
@lilja@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

30p87 ,

With most topics, I find fastgpt to be the most up to date, accurate and best sourced. And with just a normal search there's basically just one expandable strip with AI, no real annoyance for me.

churros ,

I was against the ai integrations until I started actually trying them… quick answers are awesome.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/620e7bdb-4e33-412e-9282-739d269cb89d.png

problematicPanther ,
@problematicPanther@lemmy.world avatar

so apparently google search is just shitty now, that's the takeaway here.

kaffiene , (edited )

Try being a programmer in the 90s. Just like that but with no entries at all

cjk ,

💯 came here to say that.

GJdan ,

Okay, Yahoo and AskJeeves didn't have anything useful. Let's try this Google thing.

barsoap ,

Altavista. Back when keywords still meant something.

JargonWagon , (edited )

I'm guessing it was more like "Let me pull this book off the shelves and wade through that for the answers"

kaffiene ,

Yeah. Can I get a book - usually something official like K&R for C.

WarmApplePieShrek ,

And the book had all the answers.

Test_Tickles ,

The book had half ass answers. Their examples rarely had anything to do with reality.

Hammerheart ,

So not a whole lot has changed. I cringe thinking of all the youtube video that explain OOP like this

class Animal:


class Dog(Animal):
Test_Tickles ,

Jesus... You should worn a man before you try to trigger his PTSD.

fibojoly ,

It was called The x86 Assembly Bible and I would not have been able to do much of anything without it.

Blackmist ,

I learnt C on an Amiga. No memory protection at all. Pointer errors would likely need a reboot to recover.

I rebooted a lot.

kaffiene ,

I also learned C on the Amiga. I loved SAS C. I also came across C++ first on the Amiga when it was just a pre processor for C.
I really loved that machine but it was the community that was special

pkill ,

don't use Google, problem solved

SecretPancake ,

Third result in DDG.

RandysGut ,
@RandysGut@lemmy.world avatar

I searched for Magic The Gathering cards earlier on my phone (FireFox mobile), and got YouTube shorts in the results. This was in addition to a large amount of useless info panels and junk in the search results. I just wanted the official links or even an Amazon URL to the upcoming precons, not slowly regurgitated info!

thecodeboss ,

Tried it on Bing too for comparison, 4th result and it's actually the current version.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/afc7f7f8-ab70-4b1f-8f09-36f01293035d.png

bluewing ,

Mistakes were made. It happens, OK? I'm quite certain Bing won't let THAT happen again......../////

For my, VERY limited needs for the tiny bit I have dabbled in programing or even just help with some Linux issues, I've been using Phind. It seems to work a whole lot better than any of the other search engines. But my needs can't really twist the tail like real programmers.

Blackmist ,

Oh please don't make me use Bing.

dullbananas ,
@dullbananas@lemmy.ca avatar

I will make you keep a postgreql docs tab open and use its search bar

theneverfox ,
@theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

I feel like I've been going crazy, web searching as a developer has become a daily nightmare and all the devs I ask are like "yeah, maybe it's gotten a bit worse? Haven't really noticed"

nintendiator ,

Skill issue. Old version docs tend to offer you a redirect to more recent docs, and even then something sintactic like an "IN" operator is unlikely to change in form or structure between versions of a database engine.

kattenluik ,

You realize It's just an example right?

nintendiator ,

Course I do. Why, do you need a link to the newest version of the joke?

kattenluik ,

Ohh I get it, it's so hilarious that no one knew it was a joke!

I guess you can always laugh at it yourself.

moonpiedumplings ,

Old version docs tend to offer you a redirect to more recent docs

Sadly, the docs, I've worked with (openstack and ansible) frequently, don't do this. They have a button to go to the latest version of the docs, but not to the equivalent page on the latest version. This means I have to find the equivalent page again, from the integrated search usually.

And yes, a lot can change between versions. New features can get added that solve your problems or older stuff can get removed.

nintendiator ,

They have a button to go to the latest version of the docs, but not to the equivalent page on the latest version

Oh yeah this is a PITA. Tho in that case it's skill issue on their end.

bitchkat ,

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.

tiredofsametab ,

You didn't include a version in your query. You also could try using quotes, though this specific entry may not be helped by it (e.g. "in operator"). For most things, you can click a link with the older version and somewhere there is typically a dropdown or something to change the version and, if not, you'll at least know which section/etc. it is in in the new documentation.

If you don't include a version, it's probably going to pull up questions/answers that it finds most match in general and maybe people just aren't asking that question for your version.

I think there's a lot to hate about modern search results, but I also think there's some opportunity to search better. I do miss the days when AND, OR, and NOT operators actually worked all the time and as expected.

jonasw ,

Kagi:

https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/c1456a12-871e-4fda-8e50-716eb0d7de6d.png

First result is the official documentation with the page that contains information about the in operator

This was the result: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/functions.html

BUT it is the documentation for 9.0

Though if I would use postgresql documentation very often I could just use the Kagi feature that rewrites URLs with a regex, so I can replace it always with the latest version.

Kagi Documentation for that feature:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html#redirects-url-rewrites

Some use cases of redirects include:

  • Change domains to a preferred domain (reddit.com to old.reddit.com)
  • Fixing links to outdated documentation with bad SEO
  • Rewriting proxied pages (like Google AMP) to their source URL
  • Changing any http link to https
Woovie ,

Interesting, my Kagi results gave W3Schools, geeks for geeks, and postgresqltutorial.com before the official docs, but hey still way better than OP's results!

jonasw ,

Kagi has search personalization where you can lower/raise/pin specific domains (one of kagis main selling points) and I blocked geeks for geeks and w3schools, as these are irrelevant for me and I don't want them in my results

pkill ,

can't you do that on a self-hosted searxng? I know you can do that with YaCY, but YaCY search results kinda suck

jonasw , (edited )

I don't think that's possible with searxng (but I'm not 100% sure, but I can't seem to find that feature)

I know there are browser extensions which can filter out domains in search results for different search engines like google and duckduckgo.

But the pinning/lowering/raising is a bit trickier to implement as an extension, because what kagi does is basically:

  1. Load 3 pages of search results in the backend
  2. Show a result as the first entry if it matches a rule for pinning
  3. Influence the search ranking algorithm with the lower/raise rules of the user
  4. Filter out blocked domains

It would be possible but not as "streamlined" as Kagi does.

Don't get me wrong, Kagi definitely has its rough edges and the search ranking algorithm is sometimes very unpredictable, but it provides good enough results for me to be worth the 10$ per month for unlimited searches.

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