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Fact: 90% of science is made with quartz
… accurate
My favourite mineral - potato.
Russian in origin, if I’m not mistaken
It looks like OP tried to write $99.99 but got drunk and wrote it backwards
Could be Québécois . They put the dollar sign after the number, rather than before if I recall.
Or from a country that uses a currency that puts their sign afterwards so not that familiar with dollars
It makes sense to put thensogn after
We say 99.99 dollars not dollars 99.99
I don’t even get “did you mean” anymore. Just, we found more examples of this, so this must be what you meant.
Even DuckDuckGo straight-up tells you “we didn’t find many results containing [blank].” Yeah. That’s why I wrote [blank.]
“There are a lot of results that aren’t what you’re looking for.”
Okay, great?
Right? Literally didn’t ask.
So that “here’s irrelevant results” tactic must keep people engaged more than “tough luck, found nothing”. My takeaway based on that assumption is that people must suck at using search, unless we think we don’t want those irrelevant results but really they jog our memories or something 51% of the time…
Hadn’t considered that search engines would ruin themselves to feed Engagemagog, but in hindsight it’s hardly surprising.
That’d also explain when you show up on a front page or focus on a search bar, evanescent outline of a thought trying to take form through your fingertips, and the stupid goddamn website goes Football scores?! Celebrity babies?! Dearborn Michigan?! Large Hadron Collider?! Houseboats?!?!
Hey, eerbody else is searching The Kardashians* today so maybe you should too!
*to be replaced with non-aged cultural reference
Those last three were real examples when I checked Google just now. They’re not relevant to anything or anywhere in my life. I don’t even get it. I can’t imagine how they’re some hot new thing, today specifically. If they were just trying to shotgun people’s hyperfixations, there’d be more about transportation infrastructure and gacha games.
Interesting, the first two of the final three terms are in the news right now:
Houseboat is somewhat surprising. They have made some San Francisco Bay news in the past week:
Like multivitamins? (Also contains minerals!)
Good job little buddy!
Ever died from smallpox while holding a healing crystal?
Didn’t fucking think so 😎
“scientific data about minerals -crystal -healing” should do it
Excluding crystal from a search about minerals may eliminate more than you want.
I’ve tried the exclusion Boolean term with Google before, and it really didn’t work :(
Is there any good search engines? I mean I’ve tried searching recently for a solution I referenced 3 months ago and it’s disappeared from Google and Bing.
Shit, even looking up repair information for a household appliance if can’t find the model before the newest and it all points to a sale page for the newest version.
Maybe AkJeeves!?
Kagi is meant to be okay, but it’s paid.
There’s also SearX which you could self host.
I second Kagi with the additional mention of their “lens” feature that allows results to be restricted to scholarly sources which is very relevant to the meme’s search needs.
For a scholar lens, you can use Google scholar
& that pdf search after.
Plus forum search so you never have to add “reddit” or “lemmy” to your search phrase again.
https://scholar.google.com/ hasn’t been quite as enshittified
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now, and I never went back to Google. Maybe give it a try !
I use duck duck go but sometimes I just have to use google.
Use same search terms etc and can’t get what I want.
You should try DDG’s “bangs” then. They are shortcuts you can type to narrow your search or use another search engine from DDG’s interface.
!gm Singapore will search for Singapore directly in Google Maps !w Singapore will search for the word in Wikipedia !g will search in Google, etc.
Ohh I love that, I always have to resort to google maps to search specific things now I will try that.
Thanks so much
My understanding is that duckduckgo is just Bing without tracking, I also have used it for a few years to decent success but figure it’s worth noting
I’ve been using bing at work and it’s surprisingly good. It’s got tracking and ads and crap but it’s really more like Google was a few years ago than anything
Frankly I tend to agree. I started using it for the rewards, now that they nerfed that program I still use it since the search is better than Google, copilot intrusion aside
Basically Google.
I get my best results with either Duckduckgo or with Searx. Neither run their own index but the independent index searches I’ve tried have been straight up ass. It seems right now the best thing you can do is simply escape the curated personalized results bubbles
Somehow I trained my bubble well entirely by accident, because for the most part google still gets me the results I look for with an ok success rate
Mozilla recently announced some kind of partnership with Qwant. Hadn’t heard of it before, and I was highly skeptical (I’m a very cynical person). I tried it out and honestly I think it gives me on-average better results than Google and Bing does. Since it doesn’t track you it doesn’t personalise the results at all, and as far as I can tell it doesn’t have any ads, though I do use an adblocker so don’t quote me on that. It’s also very snappy. Bing often has long loading times for me, which was incredibly frustrating.
The problem is that humanity now has an incentive to produce spam content (ad money) and programs that can meticulously craft spam content to look like it’s written by a human (LLMs).
I have to assume that the result is tons of spam content, which the traditional search engines have to sift through.
If they’d present you with all that spam content, you wouldn’t find anything useful.
So, they try to filter out that spam content, but because it looks like it’s written by a human, they’re going to accidentally filter out useful content, too.There’s also at least some measurements, that search results are decidedly getting worse: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/google_search_results_spam/
So, yeah, I think, all traditional search engines are massively struggling with this. Maybe something can be done with only indexing known-good sites, but for specialty information, like the repair information of your household appliance, that will probably be worse…
kagi
I thought crystal healing was limited to common minerals like quartz? Anything niche shouldn’t be on their radar
scholar.google.com is where you want to go.
Also, in my Google-fu experience technical terms work well for finding better scholarly results.
I still remember trying to find the space group for Copper Telluride. No amount of technical terms could help me there.
P6/mmm?
Same experience I have had. Swapping to scholar gets me relevant results that aren’t filled with ai gibberish and backwater Hokum. Still have to be careful about study sizes and sigma values and applicability, but miles ahead for at least getting to that being my issue.
Your scholarly ways are not safe from AI gibberish.
Yes this is absurd, but it’s a (serious) scientific community issue, not a search engine issue.
What’s the scientific term for rocks?
In fairness, I was thinking specifically of plants. I expect better results when looking up “S. lycopersicum” than “tomato”.
An example off the top of my head is saying pyrite instead of fool’s gold.
Putting scientific in the search criteria should redirect there then.
At the very least, it might be nice if they ask you if you want to go there instead.
On the other hand, I’m just happy that Google Scholar hasn’t gotten completely destroyed by SEO yet.
Mullvad Leta?
Duckduckgo lite?
duckduckgo onion?
Brave search?
What are some others?
SerXing?
Startpage?
Several different very privacy friendly browsers have those in them by default.
God I had this issue looking for used wheels for my car. Like, actual wheels to use for a track day, but results showed nothing but simracing threads for used STEERING wheels.
The only way crystals can heal you is if that crystal is salt and your illness is a salt deficiency.
You could probably use crystals of other elements to treat other deficiencies too, such as iron? But it’s probably easier to just take an iron tablet or eat some food containing iron 😂
What if I’m bleeding out from a gunshot wound and I have a crystal that is sufficient diameter to plug said gunshot wound?
Helps not die. Not so much heal.
Not dying helps heal.
I remain skeptical. But you do you.
Presenting to the emergency room with hyponatremia, from hypo meaning low, natron meaning sodium, and hemia meaning presence in blood. Low sodium presence in blood !
To be fair; pretty common.
As a gem and mineral collecting hobbyist I feel this pain so, so much.
Psyhub is pretty useful for most articles behind a paywall.
