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Comment by VWWHFSfQ | Hacker News Reader

The blogspam has made Google and Bing/DDG almost completely unusable for technical searches.

Go search for something like "postgres cte" and you won't find anything useful until probably halfway down the page. And maybe not at all.

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"Do you want to learn about blogspam? If so, you are on the right page. You will learn about blogspam here. One of the most major things about blogspam is that it exists on the Internet. You just learned that blogspam exists on the Internet. In this way, you have become educated about blogspam.

Now that you know about blogspam, we'll move on to the next topic: How to find blogspam. It's actually very easy to find blogspam. You are on the right page if you want to learn about finding blogspam..."

This is also giving me Microsoft "independent advisor" vibes.

This killed the blogosphere, and will kill any decentralized system that becomes popular unless they can do something extremely clever.

Instead of a dark forest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest) think of the outer internet as a fake forest. If you wander off the beaten path - the same dozen sites that everyone uses and complains about - you wander into an endless, trackless zone of fakes all of which are ultimately trying to sell you something.

Thanks for the fun analogy. It is right on the money.

Made me imagine the invention of the internet as the big bang, and that now we are watching the expansion of e-space as all the useful bodies rush away from one another and the light-years of space between them is filled by a vacuum of usefulness.

Maybe one day the search for intelligent life in space will be easier than the search for intelligent life on the internet.

That’s funny. Is that how pages go up in rank? Make many references to the same word and make circular arguments?!

I searched for that (without the quotes) and this was the 2nd result:

https://www.postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-tutorial/postg...

The first result was the official documentation.

What else are you expecting?

Google search always gives lousy results, except when you have complained about it, in which case people who check your work always get optimal results. /s

I see this from time to time myself where someone points out how bad the results are, but different results for me when trying the example. However, there are certain other things that I have searched for myself that absolutely resulted in crap results from SEO/blogspam type of results. So I know 100% it happens.

What I'm wondering is how much of your recognized fingerprint influences the results? What causes results to be different from user to user using the same search query?

he was expecting nobody to check his BS

Typical. Some people always complain about Google search results nowadays but I very rarely see actual bad examples.

What kind of results do you get when you Google the term? For me, the PostgreSQL documentation[1] came out on the top.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/queries-with.html

For HTML, CSS, Javascript, and browser APIs, I simply add "mdn" to the search to guarantee I get the official-ish MDN docs. From there, I can dive in to W3C specs, etc if needed.

Those training wheel search results are annoying but they're highly ranked probably because most people like and use them.

There are also Chrome and Firefox extensions to remove results from W3Schools specifically

For me, #1 is the official documentation, #2 is a decent looking tutorial, #3 has a slightly better page on google, #4 is a clear kagi winner.

Neither of them offers bad results, but we are talking about google, it makes no sense to give example searches without saying what results you receive as Google is so heavily personalized.

Kagi does personalization, but it’s explicit. You yourself decide the region to search in (my default is international, though there are quick bangs to search in other regions), and you can up- or downrank domains, as well as block them completely.

Always add the keyword 'forum' to your search terms. It filters out most of the crap.

"hackernews post, deeply knowledgeable, FAANG dayjob, startups with VC funding, increased conversion rates, trending on artstation"

Maybe it's just me but search results for that were very helpful in my case. Official documentation, stack overflow questions, an informative blog about cte gotchas, all within the top half of results.

Just Googled it, the first result is official postgres documentation, second is a tutorial, what exactly you get / expect when you search for it?

I just duckduckgoed it and 2nd and 3rd results are tutorial spam. 2nd is geeksforgeeks...

Here are the results for that query on Kagi if you want to compare:

https://kagi.com/search?q=postgres+cte&r=us&sh=5-n8GUySt5qmx...

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