this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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[โ€“] hertg@infosec.pub 60 points 3 weeks ago (15 children)

If you want to find solutions online, stop using Google.

Sometimes I post stuff to my blog about things that I could not find a satisfying solution to and where I had to figure one out myself. I post those things because I want it to be discoverable by the next person who is searching for it.

I did a quick test, and my posts don't show up anywhere on Google. I can find them via Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and even Bing. But Google doesn't show my stuff, even when hitting specific keywords that only my post talks about. And if my site even shows up, it is only about +6 months after I posted.

Even tried their search console thing, it doesn't report any issues with my site. So it must be the lack of ads, cookies, and AI generated content which makes Google suspicious of it.

So, If you are an engineer looking for solutions to your problems online, just stop using Google. It's become so utterly useless, it's ridiculous. Of course you will miss all the cool AI features and scam ads, but there's always some drawbacks.

Reposting my post from Mastodon yesterday, it felt relevant. https://infosec.exchange/@hertg/112989703628721677

[โ€“] Subverb@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I totally came to say this. Google has become designed to tarpit you into staying on the site longer. They no longer have the goal of giving you what you want quickly, they want you to see more ads.

Google makes $307/yr. per user. They are strongly motivated to tarpit us. If we want a clean search experience we need to be open to the idea of paying.

As an embedded systems dev that searches a lot of obscure stuff, I use Kagi and love it. Go try its free searches and see for yourself.

If you value your time and mental stability, please do yourself a favor and go see what clean, high quality search results look like on Kagi.

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