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Comment by cityofdelusion | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what you Google. If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam. Google is still fairly good for very technical stuff, but anything of monetary value has been captured by professional advertisers and their affiliate link filled content farms.

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Basically, the more popular a topic is, the more its search results are infested with SEO spam.

Even in technical realms this holds true. One of the huge disappointments of learning JavaScript/typescript recently is how terrible and spammy searching for anything on it is. Coming from the golang world where I'm used to search results being highly relevant with few advertising spam blogs among them.

> If you search for mundane stuff like recipes, how-to guides, or product suggestions then you just get SEO spam.

I look for recipes a lot. While what I find matches the "SEO-shaped recipe blog page" template mentioned in TFA, nevertheless the results still have the recipe(s) I'm looking for.

When I need to fix/build/repair stuff, searching just youtube almost always gets me what I need or want.

I've honestly found GPT4 to be fantastic for every recipe I've tried. I list what I own, say generally what I want, and say either use what I have, or minimize the number of new things I need to buy, and tell me how to make the thing. The instructions are far more legible than SEO spam recipe sites.

Try finding decent content on gardening…

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