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 If you click on the top link from google, you would see there's a notice that the page is outdated, with a link to a current version, but said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.
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.
" 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.
Kagi only lists postgresql.org for the first 10 entries, but outdated ones in first place.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For the quick answer, it also uses the 'outdated' docs as source, but as it only gives a very shallow overview there shouldn't be any difference in version (i.e. it checks for a value in a list in all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)
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.
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.
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.
Been there. Done that. FML on searching for programming help some days. Versioning is a nightmare as the way you "used" to do things is no longer relevant and the rest of the results are some asshole saying it is a duplicate question that was answered 10 years ago...that is no longer fucking relevant!
Sorry. Yesterday sucked. I hope today is less frustration and more things working like they are supposed to.
As someone who is trying to teach themselves a few new things this year by diving to projects using them... I seriously, seriously feel you. It honestly makes me question whether I should just abandon each project I start, both professional and personal.
All the relevant hits are from years and/or 2+ versions of whatever ago or forum posts with dead links to an alleged solution.
I feel like in the past I could just dive into something and search my way through it. Now I feel like that era is over and I question whether it's me, my niche project idea, the disappearing community, or just the search engines.
Oh, that stuff happens all the time. The one that really pissed me off was Microsoft 404-ing basically their entire KB system.
That thing was standing for so long you could still find Windows 9x stuff on it, and it was glorious.
Around the time they stopped supporting windows 7, they bricked the entire thing up and started a new system. Overnight, all the Microsoft help article links went dead. Find a good forum post about an issue that you're having and someone replied with a link to the MS KB saying little more than "this should work" followed by a sea of commenters saying thanks, that worked, but when you follow the link, it goes nowhere.
And right before they did that, they started removing footnotes from KB articles that only dealt with older OSes, so if you ever needed to go back and find something, it just wasn't there anymore. For example certain RGB packing formats were only supported on newer OSes and the footnote used to tell you that, but then it disappeared. I have been directly affected by that multiple times.
I wonder if the internet archive has a full copy of the KBs from before Microsoft dumped them. I'd love to set those up in a web server so I can reference them as needed.
Eh I mean alphabet and Google do have legitimate reasons for antitrust lawsuits, but that's independent of how shit Google search has become.
Anyway, for those who are fed up with the terrible results, use Ecosia. I've basically never needed to use anything else and the advertising money goes towards planting trees responsibly to rebuild ecosystems.
Anti-trust is not about seeking perfection, it's a defense against abuses of power. That's a good thing unless you like to be abused by the powerful, in which case lick some more boots.
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.
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.
It makes me sad because Google used to be great. The main feature that made Google great was the click rejection. Basically the search would know when you clicked on a link and didn't come back to the search results. This action would add weight to that result as "this probably has the information that was being searched for" so it would be nearer to the top later when others made similar queries.
This was their killer feature, it basically crowd sourced the correct information. After a small amount of time, the correct results would kind of float to the top so subsequent searches would put those results near the top to help satisfy queries faster.
Now? They seem to want to give you results that satisfy their partners, and keep you tied to the results page as long as possible. The focus seems to have shifted from being a good search engine with accurate results, to a meme of how to make money.
Never before has this shift been more clear to me than right now, directly in the wake of I/O 2024; an event my friends have taken to calling AI/O. Pretty much every single presentation was about Gemini and AI generated garbage, but this isn't what made Google's new direction clear to me. In the last 20-30 minutes of the event it was made perfectly clear what they were doing with I/O. And to drive the point home, every I/O has showcased stuff you can't use yet, stuff they're working on, and other cool shit. Some of it cost money, but there was usually some stuff that was just done because it could be done and it would be made available at some point, a nontrivial amount of it was free. At AI/O, the entire focus was on AI, with little to no non-AI stuff in there, at all, then at the end, they kicked everyone in the shorts. Here's our prices to access this shit. Buy it. As far as I'm concerned AI/O was a gigantic marketing circle jerk to sell their AI.
It seems that Google has entered the final phases of enshittification.
Saw an article that said that some execs demanded for search to have better user retention. I.e make the user search multiple times to find what they're looking for, so they can be shown more ads.
Just in case you're not just satirically listing things that are already awful;
Supermarkets increase their "retention" by limiting signage to keep you wandering and avoid "just get that thing and go" shopping. I don't know how common this is, but when I was a kid the major supermarkets had long lists of what items were in each aisle, plus highly visible signs in the aisle to show exactly where each category was. Now days at the major chains those in aisle signs are completely gone, and the categories have been whittled down to a few major categories; most products aren't represented on the sign at all e.g. you have to assume "cake mix/decorating" are in the same aisle as "flour".
Unskippable ads on all pumps are absolutely a thing that are getting more popular. Mobil is particularly bad for it in my experience.
The square button second from the bottom mutes the audio. I've taken to carrying a marker in my car and writing "<--- MUTE" next to them. Alternatively, a small screwdriver between the speaker grating.
It's frustrating because it's all done by people. Like if a volcano erupts you can't really get mad at it. It's just physics stuff. But all of this? People are making these choices. People made of meat and bone. Like, you could find the decision makers at Google who decided to shit up their product and kick them in the junk.
What if peoples relationships create a superstructure no single human can control, and we need active collective effort to supercede it?
If a single human refuses from a moral standpoint, a humongous amount of money to do something crap as CEO controller of whichever crap company, boards will replace them, and some other human will, because material condition dictate it has to be done. No one is really in control. The boards are all just optimising for profit, because if they're not, someone else will.
How to break the capitalist cycle of control over peoples will?
Supermarkets already optimise many things, products with lower margins are at the bottom in aisles, and all the junk food or cheap liquor is next to the cashier.
Supermarkets maximizing profit: put ads everywhere and hide the most commonly bought foods!
Many supermarkets already do things like putting the milk and bread at opposite sides of the store, so you have to walk through the whole store to get both. You'd often be walking past the end caps while doing so, which are essentially ads (companies pay to have their products displayed at the end caps)
This is possibly something you could implement in a meta search engine like SearXNG, though there are some privacy concerns.
Maybe it could locally store which domains you personally tend to click (and stay) on. Then automatically raise those domains when it sees them somewhere in the output of the underlying engines. This isn't perfect because you wouldn't get data from other users. But I think it could do a lot to improve search results.
I might actually clone the repo and see if I can get somewhere soon
The thing with Google was that the data about click through vs click back was supposed to be anonymised. Whether it was or not, inside of the black box that is Google's algorithm, who knows?
Either way, I'd be interested if you get any progress here. I've never tried to self host a search engine, but I might consider it.
I remember how people used to joke about the second page of Google results being a desolate wasteland where no one ever looks, now I just instinctively scroll down a bit because I know the first page of results is going to be trash.
DuckDuckGo is also being poisoned by SEO unfortunately. Some group of people managed to crack its algorithm, and as Google is slowly but fading relevancy, DuckDuckGo is now also has the same issues.
We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.
And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe...
But then you need to know enough about the topic already to know what is stable and what changes with newer versions.
Like, the "web dev boot camp" course I got from UDemy a few years ago as a guide for building a web dev high school course: I recently went back to to look something up, and the whole thing has been completely redone start to finish. Makes sense, considering that it's updated to the newest versions of Bootstrap and other libraries (and who knows what else).
I know nothing about Rust, but I would assume there are at least some libraries that have major new versions in the last couple of years which might change best practices somehow? idk. But the harder part is not knowing what you don't know.
One search that was memorable to me was looking for dimensional information on a T-slot. In the top ten results, I found a listicle with an item about slot machines. LLM spam and Google's relentless bullshit have poisoned the internet.
I've been into computers for over 20 years and I couldn't tell you what uses rust. I am aware of it, but I am completely unaware of how narrow or broadly it is used. I keep forgetting people aren't talking about the game.
I mean, to name a few projects off the top of my head:
Firefox
Android is migrating some of their internals.
The Linux kernel, Google Chrome, Thunderbird are preparing to use Rust.
Many Python programs now have Rust in there, because of the PyCrypto library.
Fish shell is in the middle of a RiiR.
I don't feel like there's a ton of big, mature projects yet, because of how relatively young Rust still is, but performance-critical or embedded software will be strongly considering Rust in the future.
And like C, Rust can be used to create libraries which can be called from practically any other programming language. I expect that to give it significant growth in the future.
Frankly, I do most of my searching these days directly on https://std.rs and https://docs.rs . But yeah, those are usually better as a reference than for learning.
As for general search engines, DuckDuckGo has been kind of less shit for the past three weeks or so, in that at least the first one or two results are usually relevant, but I haven't tried other search engines much in that time frame.
Another tip is to make use Clippy. Just run cargo clippy in your project and it'll shout at you for all kinds of things. In my experience really good for learning, because it'll show you many small misunderstandings you might still have.
The section "other people also search for" is complete garbage.
I was searching for a used car part in my native language and Google mistook it for a name.
No, Google, other people do not search for "car part net worth and marital status ". Why are you showing me this crap?
The English word 'speaker' has multiple meanings. In Hungarian, there is a different word for a speaker device that casts sound (hangszóró, "sound caster") and Speaker of the House of Parliament (házelnök, "president of the house").
Still, when googling one, you may get results for the other. 🤷
if Kagi were open source sure, but it's $10 a month and the CEO is kind of an asshole. And a generative-AI-bro (please don't make me call them GAI-bros)
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
Search results: "Here's how you setup Rawinput in this competitive FPS, and look how it reduces input latency by a single milisecond! After 2-3 pages of AI generated SEO garbage full of misinformation, you might find something else besides of the official MS docs."
Me: "Okay, this is not working, maybe I should look for some another preexisting SDL alternative, maybe at least one of them isn't an even bigger dumpster fire than SDL itself."
Search results: "Duuuude, have you heard of this game making tool, called Gamemaker? It doesn't need coding, and it's totally the same thing, because some people mistakingly called SDL a game engine, and now my AI hallucinates it as such. If you're up to a bigger challenge, then there's always Godot, or DirectX, which my AI also hallucinates being a game engine!"
SDL, on the other hand, is not, and instead is a multimedia layer (middleware) often used for game development.
One could argue that game engines constitute as middleware, but in reality, most modern game engines are way more than that, and instead often rely on other middleware nowadays (e.g. OpenGL, or even SDL for some). This, alongside with people mistakingly calling SDL a game engine, leads to stuff like this.
