Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., "borked.exe high CPU usage" or "how to partition a drive") and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like:
The first 5-8 results are near-identical "help" sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% "download our app!", and 5% actually useful tips.
There are tech site results listed... but they're from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS.
"Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need... [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING]
If you're very, very lucky, you'll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue.
I'd consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.
Exactly this.
I've been tinkering with computers since the mid 90s, and I lost count of how many I built or repaired years ago, but now, using Google to check something I've forgotten just leads to sales pages and massively out of date articles that were 'last updated' three days ago.
On top of that, you've got sites like the official Microsoft help site giving bad advice. Everything is just run sfc /scannow then dism /whatever. I genuinely saw a question recently where someone asked what to do when dism /online-cleanup doesn't work, and the top answer, marked as correct by the mods was, run dism /online-cleanup.
Online search results have been optimised for seo so much now that finding the right answer can be very difficult.
Don't forget that those first 5-8 sites are all written by a aithat doesn't know what it's doing! You can tell those apart from ones written by a person because they cram as many keywords in different combinations as they can. Like, if you searched "windows 10 Firefox connection error" the first result will be:
"How to fix Firefox Connection Error in Windows 10
Firefox connection errors in windows 10 are annoying. Luckily, there is an easy way in windows 10 to fix Firefox conne tion errors. The Firefox connection errors in windows 10 can be caused by a few different problems. In this article we will explain how to fix Firefox connection errors in windows 10."
It's infuriating, because those articles inevitably are wrong about the solution, but they're always the top results because they win the keyword battle. I use QWant for my search engine now, and while it's WAY better than Google it still serves some of those sites up when I'm troubleshooting something because the keywords are just too strong.
Hah, I think I twitched a bit just reading that! Those stupid SEO answers drive me absolutely insane.