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.

  • @[email protected]
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    827 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 months ago

      There was an article about that recently. Apparently Marketing won the battle for control over Google Search. So it’s no longer focused on quality of product.

      • NutWrench
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        77 months ago

        Google has also gotten lazy. Their first dozen or so searches are either YouTube or Reddit results. (And that’s only when they want to pretend they’re a search engine).

    • @[email protected]
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      147 months ago

      I think you’ll enjoy watching the movie called Idiocracy. It is your AltaVista search result extrapolated to full life.