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.
yeah not ideal, but if the actual functionality of that operator hasn't changed then I wouldn't expect the version to matter. Same with searching most ruby stuff and getting old results. it hasn't changed in decades, it ain't changing now. But I did scroll down and literally every result was from the postgres docs so that's a marked improvement from the google results.
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. 🤷
I've started relying more on AI-powered tools like Perplexity for many of my search use-cases for this very fact - all results basically warrant a pre-filtering to be useful.
Unfortunately the spam arms race has destroyed any chance of search going back to the good ole days. SEO and AI content farms means we'll need a whole new system to categorize webpages, as well as filter out human sounding but low effort spam.
Point being, it's no longer enough to find a page that's relevant to the topic, it has to be relevant and actually deliver information, which currently the only feasible tech that can differentiate those is LLMs.
It would be interesting tho to use a LLM to spot AI/SEO crap and add whole domains to a search blacklist. In that case we wouldn't need AI to do the actual search, and this could easily just be a database for end users by the SE's side (kinda like explicit content filters).
I'd call that option "Bullspam filter" and leave it on "moderate" by default.
This is one solution to the issue, and it seems silly you are being downvoted for it.
Google became what it became, and years of seo optimisation cat & mouse play has reached new heights. Those obviously target Google instead of their competitors for now.
Would that we could have perfect search results, it would be beneficial to google as well.
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.
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.
Funny, we all used to avoid W3Schools because it was a heavily SEO’d ad farm, but nowadays it’s actually a Web 2.0 oasis in a hellscape of infinite scrolling AI bullshit. I’ve found myself using it over SO since their surrender to OpenAI.
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)
Had to test with Kagi also, leads with official documentation, after that tutorials and unofficial things. Nothing obviously irrelevant. The only thing with the Kagi results, was that there were a few very simmilar official documentation links (for different postgresql versions) at top. But, still good search results. Not sure why anyone is still using google, when there are quite a few better alternatives availale
It would be funny, if it weren’t painfully true. DuckDuckGo sucks just as bad as Google. I hear there is a good search engine, but it costs money to use. Shocking. Maybe they are all the same company, making shitty free services to try to steer you to paying for better services.
Not the one you replied to but they're probably talking about Kagi. I crunched the numbers a while back and the higher tiers were kind of hard to make worthwhile, however iirc they simplified the pricing slightly since then.
I've been using it for a few months. It's good. I get the official docs for my first result using OP's query. 300 queries, their starting tier was not enough for my use. I was using DDG before and like it well enough. I'm not sure if it's worth it but I like the idea of paying for services I use. I stopped using Google years ago because of all the captchas I had to fill due to my VPN
I'm cool with paying for quality, ad-free service but I feel like they're giving way too little for what they're asking. 300 searches a month? What is this AOL?
Someone has to pay lemmy. If you don't, it's comparable to a free tier of a paid service. When I say "you" I don't mean every single person. There's no option to pay for google search that I'm aware of.
Not true because we're getting the same experience whether we pay or not. The same kinda goes for google, they have other services you could pay to support them (please don't), and it won't make the search engine better. Big difference is one of them is actually free (full meaning of the word) and the other one is just usable without paying.
You're still using a free platform to say good free software is not a thing tho, kinda weird.
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.
