Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

lmao

yeah the whole act of searching is now fraught with results that don't actually contain the words you searched for, because the machine is assuming associations and syllables and people-who-searched-for-x-also-searched-for-y. and it's like, no, i picked to search these words because i'm trying to answer this specific question. now i have to open six tabs and control-F for the key words and then close them again when they're not really there.

― Good morning, how are you, I'm (Doctor Casino), Thursday, August 15, 2019 2:36 PM bookmarkflaglink

just wanted to report that, anecdotally, this perennial issue has, somehow, become staggeringly worse in like the past two weeks. on google, DDG, everything. absolutely no confidence at all that ANY of the search results displayed contain all, most, or even more than one of the search terms i included. wtf.

I think Google is experimenting with some non-cookie tracking methods, whereas your searches are mapped to a cohort... i.e. "if you love the blues, you'll love Bluez Hammer" because all these other folks that searched for similar stuff love them. So far Mozilla wants nothing to do with it, and I think others are not enthused at all as well.

all i want is to be able to search "name of building" architect or "name of building" built or (keyword) (keyword) (keyword) architect and find articles that actually include those words, so i can narrow down when things were built and who the architects might have been. instead i just get literally any page on the internet that mentions the name of the building. or some of the words in the name of the building, quotation marks be damned. fucking hell.

everything weighted towards recency too. good luck trying to find anything written about any topic before 2010 if that thing has also been written about a lot since then then.

surely these are the conditions for a nu (non-Google) Google to establish itself?

or to find access to academic resources via library, same as it ever was tbh

on google after you search click on tools, then change "all results" to "verbatim"

(andy baio of waxy.org complained about this a decade ago so google added this verbatim search)

sorry, just catching up on this thread, my reader’s digest of the past few weeks:

I guess if you're comfortable dealing with Python packages, there are some great packages.

oh, i for one am super comfortable dealing with python packages. you just unzip it, and it runs in your browser. (sorry about the formatting and huge-ass image)

cant believe no one is commenting how great and horny this is!

disclaimer: this technological advancement can lead to dismemberment

abanana, thank you so much for the 'verbatim' trick!!!! i'd seen references to that feature but they were really old articles and for whatever reason i wasn't seeing it in the post-search tools. i guess i'm switching back to Google from DDG just for the ability to easily do that. huge huge huge time-saver. sigh.

there is a "default to verbatim" plugin but it ruined my search results in a different way after a while. I use duck duck go more these days but if I'm honest the results aren't that much better.

surely these are the conditions for a nu (non-Google) Google to establish itself?

as Doc said, even DDG is creaking under the strain of there being just way too much garbage on the web now

abanana - thanks so much!!!! this verbatim thing is great

Being placed in a help queue because a company fucked up and didn't send me the correct files, which I paid for. Like, maybe you could have sent the correct files the first time so I don't have to keep going back and forth with a customer service rep?

I'm reminded of why I used to use soulseek unapologetically before the arrival of bandcamp's UX and payment improvements a while ago. Downloading music files from almost any other site is a waste of time and energy.

I think you also can still put individual words or phrases in quote marks to make Google search for them verbatim

https://www.google.com/amp/s/searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-98189/amp

Yep. Just tried it. Still works. I’m used to putting phrases in quotes but had forgotten that you can do it around single words too.

I've definitely done quote searches where my demands have been overridden, though. The tip about verbatim mode is good and I will be using that. Seriously, search engines being almost useless these days is my biggest technological bugbear. It makes me so fucking angry.

yeah, the quotes don't work for me. it's like they've told the algorithm "if it's in quotes, it's *fairly* important, but feel free to disregard also!"

the good news is that google wants to make this problem significantly worse: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/14/1024918/language-models-gpt3-search-engine-google

The digital tools used in modern radio broadcasting are super-glitchy: "Do we have Dennis on the line? Okay, it looks we lost Dennis, we'll try to get him back on.. meanwhile.."
I remember old analog phone lines sounding tinny on the radio but being fairly reliable. NPR is always cutting out and losing guests, but that may be because of pandemic-related home broadcast setups.

User issue imo

We used landlines and big fat analog consoles in the 90s, and we still had those problems.

Cellphones (used by callers sitting in traffic) probably the main culprit.

I know sign-up security questions are notoriously awful, but this selection seems to me especially egregious. I don't have a definitive answer to any of these questions, and even if I did it's likely I wouldn't word it or spell it exactly the same next time. What's more, since it's for a workplace pension thing, I have to select THREE of these to answer and presumably remember what I said until next time I need to sign in, when I'm like 65 or so.

https://i.ibb.co/7gs9dLT/security-question.png

I thought the same when presented with this multi-question format but then when I actually got asked the answers they were as multiple choices, so not as hard

Haven't these questions been acknowledged as Bad Practice for more than a decade now?

I do hate answering them, because I resent corporations taking this grab inside my personal life, even without the security worry of them being leaked and being used to crack my account on other sites.

I guess I could make up answers and save them as a note inside a password manager but I have a fear of being unable to reset them if that gets lost and having someone say "Well if you lied to us about the name of your favourite primary school teacher I'm not sure I can help you regain control of your pension". Plus it's a faff.

I used to just make the answer to everything "eat my ass"

Coincidentally, that is actually my mother's maiden name.

And I've been pronouncing it "iht Mee us" all this time

excellent work everyone

I'm still paying the price of spelling "New Orleans" as "Nawlins" somewhere 15 years ago.

I remember someone with a very country accent calling once and trying to do security questions with me and the one she couldn't get was "Name of first pet", but she couldn't understand that we were looking for the individual animal's name, not the "type" of animal. she said she grew up on a farm, so the guesses went something like:

"a cow?"
"a chicken?"
"a pig?"

all while me subtly trying to hint "did any of these animals have names you called them by other than PIG?"

That's amazing.

"In what city did your parents meet?" "It was in a town?"

I used to just make the answer to everything "eat my ass"

would it work universally ... with the spaces and all? I always wonder about the people who answer these things completely sincerely. Also, I'm wary of giving sincere answers because mine tend to be pretty common ... like if I were someone trying to commit identity theft and had to guess the name of someone's first pet, "Blackie" or "Fluffy" would be pretty likely guesses ... as opposed to ... buttplug

yeah that's one reason I used to give bullshit answers because of my fear of exactly that, but then when I lock my account, I can't remember whether the answer is "What is your father's middle name" is "Butthole" or "Go fuck yourself".

just ask your mom

i've long thought that subjective security questions like "what is your favorite book?" reveal a lot about the people who create them

http://zachscott.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/subjectivesecurity.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/t6dJ1zA.jpg

lmao

I just have a mental list of favorite movie, book, band, meaning of life that I use specifically for these questions.

I'd love if at some point there was some data dump of what the most common answers are for these questions.

lol karl

omg that list is great ...

xxxp Neando -- I had this issue a little while ago where it asked for name of childhood best friend, and I couldn't remember whether I had chosen the name of the biggest asshole at the City Building & Planning Dept or Godot

or maybe it was Fluffy?

Y'know it really gives you a sense of perspective about age and time and the relative duration of human existence compared to that of a cat, because this guy who is the biggest asshole at the City Building & Planning Department, has been the biggest asshole longer than Fluffy was alive ... and she had a pretty long life for a cat!

Just found the worst google result of all time. Probably due to my location but a search for "sketch" returns:

1) THREE SCREENS (on my phone) of details about sketch london restaurant (description, contact info including link to website, opening times, covid info, popular times, critics reviews)
2) one standard search result for the same restaurant's webpage already linked above
3) links to six subpages of THE SAME website, on six separate lines
4) four 'people also ask' questions, three of which are about the restaurant
5) a search result for a design app with a huge but pointless thumbnail
6) a link to the restaurant's instagram page, huge thumbnail
7) a horizontal scrolling list of youtube links
8) four 'people also search for' results
9) three app store results with large thumbnails
10) two rows of images, extra large thumbnails
11) a link to the restaurants facebook page
13) three rows of giant scrolling thumbnail results for for 'afternoon tea', lively places', 'best places to eat'
14) see results for sketch (software), sketch (drawing)
15) related searches

Obviously searching for a single term means google thinks that I am a cretin who needs my food pre chewed but that doesn't excuse this shitshow of wrong tree barking, repetition, social media pushing, and near total lack of actual web search results.

otm

Yes, Google’s attempts to move behind boring old links to web pages is quite frustrating at times.

Out of interest, what were you actually looking for?

also, i spotted a new backward step yesterday. maybe we can nip it in the bud before we all just accept it. the cooler cases at a Walgreens, instead of having glass or clear plastic fronts so you can see what's inside, are entirely faced with a video screen showing a depiction of the kind of shelves found inside, stocked with the kind of drink products or frozen foods that might, or might not, actually be on those shelves once you swing open the door to find out for sure. obviously the goal is to find more places to stick video advertising.

the list of fundamental flaws with this approach basically writes itself, but obviously that is no guarantee that this will die a quiet death before being rolled out to millions of coolers nationwide.