Submitted 6 months ago by sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
The Verge published this spam article about the “best printers of 2024” to demonstrate how terrible Google’s search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search “best printer” on Google.
I love a good, informative troll.
Strange how Google became the default search engine back in the day because they were so good at filtering out the dumb websites that just spam search terms all over the page.
Not sure if you read the recent article or not, but the guy responsible for this enshittification came from Yahoo, where he applied the same policies. So you’re more literally correct than you may think
Destroying search engines as a career…
Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.
Personally really like ddg over it though. Only gotta be more precise with keywording for finding what you need.
Reddit used to be better, but now any time you search for advice on good _____ to buy, the only answers you can find are “use the search function, this question has been answered already”
To be fair when Google solved SEO spam in 1999, thanks to pagerank, it was no small feat. The others were bad not because they abused ads but because they didn’t know how to deal with cheating webmasters.
DDG is better, but only in the sense that Google got so bad that now it’s worse than it.
I think it takes a while for that kind of competitor to emerge and gain enough traction to become a genuine alternative option. The primary option everyone long since adopted kinda has to suck for a while :/
I’m starting to feel like a shill because I say this so often, but Kagi is the only one I’ve found that actually does the job anymore. To me a search engine that works is worth the small cost each month, but unfortunately I don’t see paying for search becoming mainstream anytime soon.
chatGPT and in apps integrated AI search is stealing it.
The demise of google search is by design. techspot.com/…/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-why-… TL;DR. Management noted that search revenue was not growing, so the head of google search Prabhakar Raghavan made it worse so you have to click more to get what you want. More clicks = more money = growth = happy investors = enshitification. Fuck you Prabhakar Raghavan.
Zitron, though, describes him as “a computer scientist class traitor who sided with the management consultancy sect.”
Based
And by making the search engine worse and worse, they open the opportunity to bring AI chat as a “savior”, and people will think it revolutionized internet search.
From the article…
Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
I have to admit, it was an interesting read, not quite like anything I’ve ever read before, for a review.
I honestly can’t tell if this is just some genius way of sliding in some AI generated content into a review and getting it to pass our review, or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated with Google’s search algorithm paying attention to manipulation by others, so trying to really get their stuff out there for us to see.
Either way, it’s definitely worth the read.
As far as Brother printers go, I own an all-in-one laser that’s over a decade old, and it’s still going strong. And it actually works with Linux to boot. I do hate though that they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early, but if you mask sensors and such, then an existing toner will work forever.
There are very few printers that don’t work with Linux. Linux has drivers to interface with most of them through whatever means you like, right in the kernel.
That’s one of the reasons my android phone (Linux kernel, remember) is better at finding and queuing up prints on a network printer than any windows machine I’ve ever used.
I just hit share on a document, choose print… And then it just works.
There are very few printers that don’t work with Linux.
I was speaking with the all-in-one types, that includes scanners and fax machines.
Most printer companies don’t make their drivers work well with Linux (or at the very least used to not), and even Brother was in that same boat early on.
But as of late they’re much better, so when you run a Brother installer for the drivers it’s just all installs and works now, where in the past you had to worry about 32 bit versus 64 bit libraries in the OS and how they interact with the brother drivers, etc., etc.
they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early
My brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves in low toner mode.
The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that’s not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.
The alternative mode is to just show a “low toner” warning badge whenever you print a document. That’s what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don’t do.
Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.
What, like the printer would explode or something kind of disaster?
Or the kind of where the printout doesn’t come out well, and you put a new cartridge in, and then you reprint and it looks fine, type of disaster?
The guy who wrote it is the editor-in-chief.
The guy who wrote it is the editor-in-chief.
Yep. I mentioned that in my comment.
Could you elaborate on your point?
One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don’t actually need to print but that’s pretty cool.
One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don’t actually need to print but that’s pretty cool.
People keep missing that I’m talking about it all-in-one, and not just a simple printer-only.
I never had a problem with the printing part of the all-in-one printer, but the scanning and faxing stuff required the Brother driver support, and that wad not natively supported, or were supposed to be supported but it didn’t work well, or at all. There were issues with 32-bit versus 62-bit libraries, etc.
Took years to get to a point where the brother drivers would just install and everything would work right. And not everything ever worked right from native Linux.
I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.
Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.
There was article about that recently. Apparently Marketing won the battle for control over search. So it’s no longer focused on quality of product.
I think you’ll enjoy watching the movie called Idiocracy. It is your AltaVista search result extrapolated to full life.
Heck, I didn’t even need “2024”, just “best printer” worked.
Google used to list sites with backlinks highly, it was their first ever search algorithm iirc. Once people learned you could game that by planting useless backlinks, Google realised it was a bad idea.
Somehow, they’ve reinvented this all over again with parasite SEO that fundamentally works the same way. All they did was add some “domain ranking”. Now, unreliable-but-popular sites coughredditcough will always score highly regardless of quality, because Google deemed them superior.
reddit is a very good search resource though because it has 15 years of real people giving real information. I imagine reddit from here on out will be going hard on the enshitification train so it’s value as a search resource will rapidly decline.
Can confirm, it’s still the top result under the sponsors. And it’s an amusing read.
With the prevalence of reddit Google was of the most useful tools I’ve seen in my 40 years on earth. Only to to absolute shit in the last 2-3 years.
Best breadcrumb from article:
I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these [SEO/Google] people making money off of everyone else’s misery?
I don’t get ads in general. They don’t work. I never bought something that got presented to me from an ad because I know ads are deliberately lying to me, so the product they show is the first product I don’t consider purchasing.
Missing the days of consumer reports.
I still sign up with them when I’m researching bigger, or long-lasting, purchases. Cars, washing machine, and that sort of thing. I’m always a little annoyed at the price, but the content is SO MUCH better than any other online review source that I’m always happy with my decision in the end. Reddit comments are probably second, but I’ve found those to be littered with what seem to me to be suspiciously positive reviews for items that are not significantly better than their competition. I feel like I need to dial up my critical nature to 10 to fight against the echo chamber and/or the covert advertising.
And Wirecutter used to be good but they will occasionally point out how highly rated something is, and cross checking against falespot et al indicates a lot of fake reviews.
Sigh. So many things in the world are like this. It’s not a bad idea, in theory, to favor more recent pages in search results. Finding 4 year old information is often not what you want. But in practice, when everyone knows this bias exists, they just fiddle with their pages daily to try to fool the algorithm. It’s must be aggravating to be Google, because as smart as they are, the entire world is engaged in an unending and ruthless quest to game their results for personal gain.
Yup, and that’s why we shouldn’t have one dominant search engine, but a few that all do things differently. That way gaming the system is a lot more difficult. But I guess that’s not the world we live in…
The next good search engine will on ironically be a Microsoft chatbot of some kind
Takes all of the AI processing power in the world to make Bing a good search
You mean current Bing co-pilot?
Bing has gotten so much worse in the last 5 years, it’s not even better than google anymore
Search results aside, why can I no longer copy the result from Bing’s calculator anymore
This was actually a very funny read.
Also yes, Brother printers are the best because they actually work.
you are a printer we are all printers
Technically we are highly complex, self replicating 3D printers.
yes i also noticed google search is absolute trash lately. so i switched to searx and life is better. i only go to google for street view and reverse image search now.
Omg I can’t believe they used AI to write this article 😡
For the record though, I used bing for the duration of 2023, sort of as an experiment to use the ai assistant.
Bing search is worse that Google by a long shot. I almost always gave up and used Google.
Give SearxNG a try. There are browser plugins available for it. I was using Librey but I’m finding SearxNG to be better.
Kagi
Paying for search aligns incentives better than free search.
It’s also the best results from a search engine I’ve had in a decade.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!
Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one.
Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.
Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
Brother laser printers are strong contenders, especially for black and white printing needs, but weigh the pros and cons against other options like inkjets before deciding.
The original article contains 428 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Do any of us still use Google in this way though?
Sure maybe nanna still talks to google like an Oracle… “oh Google what is the best printer of 2024”
I don’t think Google can be blamed too much for presenting an article from a relevant, generally trustworthy site, that has the search query as the article title.
frankgrimeszz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
In my experience, lately it recommends shitty blogs loaded with adverts and keywords. My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
That aside, my Brother laser printer is still working great. No complaints.
Pechente@feddit.de 6 months ago
Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google’s quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don’t get the desired result and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.
smort@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”
Opisek@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yup. I constantly found myself appending !g for important queries that I needed an answer for right then and now. Google has stopped providing that commodity. It’s almost never worth it anymore to fall back to Google.
ThirdWorldOrder@lemm.ee 6 months ago
pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online 6 months ago
My DDG searches have been absolute garbage for the past few months. About 75% of the time I have to re-search my keywords on Google to actually get a relevant result.
It’s bad enough that I’m about to switch back to Google.
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s not been my experience. I’ve been using DDG for years, and when I first switched I would occasionally have to go find something on Google instead. That slowly fell off as the years went by because going to Google and getting better search results became rarer and rarer. It’s to the point now where I don’t even do it, unless I need to look at something on street view.
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
Unfortunately, this has also been my DuckDuckGo experience for several months. I wish it wasn’t
Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Try Startpage. I have just started using it so I can’t tell you how it compares. I also need to look up who owns it. But I have been told it has the same privacy qualities of DDG.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
It depends on what your searching. For me programming questions are way better on google.
Also searching obvious questions like a country’s population, google still does its job there too.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I deleted their app and moved search engines, they got shit quick. So bad at their main usp. I was constantly fed hyper local results, local even with location off. And dont get me started on how bad it was for porn.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
use Indie Wiki Buddy extension to get rid of fandom.
catloaf@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Or ublacklist to block any site: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…/ublacklist/
Matriks404@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This extension stopped working correctly for me some time ago. It just stopped redirecting to breezewiki correctly.
Everythingispenguins@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It has a partnership with bing. So sadly now it is mostly a bing clone. I have been using DDG for a decade. I noticed a distinct drop in search quality after the bing partnership.
merthyr1831@lemmy.world 6 months ago
If I’m looking up something general, like some actor or tv show, then DDG is perfect. If im troubleshooting some weird software issue then i find it doesnt always list as many results, as if it hasnt indexed as many sites.
DDG at least now means I can search random shit without it suddenly being inserted into my social media algorithms like some kind of psychological torture.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Oh my god the Fandom wiki for minecraft uses the same little tab icon as the actual minecraft wiki but it has a fucking “are you an adult or child” popup EVERY SINGLE TIME a page loads
I hate it so much
rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Use breezewiki extension. Redirects fandom articles to a frontend that removes their bullshit and replaces fandom with independant wikis when possible.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Immortal Tanks, those Brother printers. Best in the biz.
sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
If you have any tips or tricks for DDG please do share! I’m definitely getting better overall results there, but the local ones can still be a bit rough.
frankgrimeszz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m no expert but this should be useful: makeuseof.com/…/duckduckgo-search-tricks-student/
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 6 months ago
What do you mean by “local”? If you mean finding somewhere to go for lunch or the opening hours of a store, I recommend using the maps app on your phone (I prefer Apple Maps over Google, because it uses Yelp and TripAdvisor for reviews which are accurate than Google reviews… if I had an Android phone I’d probably install Yelp/TripAdvisor).
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Unfortunately DDG has been dogshit in my native language. Shame
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I found that Qwant gives decent results in my native non English language, results similar in quality to Google, but way better than DDG which often just gives English results.
rf_@lemmy.world 6 months ago
What are better alternatives to fandom? I see the incumbents name get repeated more often than the alternative unfortunately.
sensiblepuffin@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The problem is that fandom tends to vacuum up and supersede the smaller wikis, and the SEO bullshit just makes it happen even faster. The answer to your question unfortunately is “it depends on the game/show/fandom”.
force@lemmy.world 6 months ago
wiki.gg is where most of the wikis have transferred to
UckyBon@lemmy.world 6 months ago
DDG tries very hard to push Amazon and Ebay to me. They’re not even available in my country 😅
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That seems like a bug assuming you have your region selected/enabled? I’d report it to DDG.