this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 30 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.

Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.

And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.

Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.

I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.

[–] NostraDavid@programming.dev 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

and occasionally Google translate

deepl.com is a decent alternative, if you want to replace Google Translate

[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve heard of it, but haven’t tried yet - but I will.

[–] johant@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

I always preferred deepl for translations. That is until I started using chatgpt which seem to usually do a much better job than either google or deepl (for the languages I have tried).