Just done 4 searches and got the exact same results regardless of “before:2023”
Yeah, tried it when this first got mentioned. Doesn’t do squat.
I imagine google have changed the settings.
I also note Duckduck doesnt give great results these days either.
I find DDG still provides more reliably useful results than google, but not by much.
It’s because these are two idiots trying to sound smart. I have used pre-2015 searches, because sometime between 2009-2016 is when SEO in general started being used. The AI generation just kicked it into high gear. Stuff before 2015 at least appears to offer information that isn’t just reworded lists of advertisements.
…interesting…
The year is 2235, and the warp drive has been invented. I go to search Google for the latest news on the tech but remember this old bit of advice from an old meme that was floating around almost 2 centuries ago I saw once while lurking in the Ancient Memes community. All I find are things taken from fiction. Only about 25% are factually accurate.
At this point, 25% is pretty solid.
This only makes sense for a very limited set of things tho. The things where AI makes a difference are art stuff, news and creative writing stuff. What purpose do news from before 2023 have? Maybe for research purposes it filters out some bullshit but then you also miss out anything relevant that happened after 2022.
Not news. Things like recipes have been put through the AI filter to add a lot of useless crap. Try looking up “how to roast a chicken” and getting useable results.
It’s always someone’s life story when all I want is a discussion of the cooking process. That content is hard to create. It’s a lot easier to just have AI make up a fake life story.
I think you’ve got it backwards. This only excludes new information from the past two years. Literally everything else is majorly improved.
I believe they’re arguing that AI is particularly used in news, and when looking up news, you’re typically seeking current events, in which case excluding post 2023 content doesn’t work.
In my opinion, the place I encounter AI content the most is in list content, not just clickbait lists but also stuff where multiple products are compared. If I’m looking up what laptop to get, AI articles pop up comparing 10 products with inaccurate and messy details, but also I don’t want to see old products.
Also IMO, in many cases Google search has been useless for 6+ years now. I think it was around 2018 where I started ending my search terms in ‘reddit’ because the first few articles were poorly advised clickbait, especially when looking for any advice (Reddit of course went to shit anyway). Google is only useful now for navigating to popular sites that will inevitably float to the top of any search query due to popularity. The only other common use for me is correcting typos when autocorrect is stumped.
Not gonna spend a whole lot time arguing intent; you can see what was posted already.
Per unexpectedhazard above;
This only makes sense for a very limited set of things tho.
I’m saying that news is a very limited set of things that you look up on google, and literally everything else will improve with this trick. Just because a single user only spends their google time looking up news articles does not mean that everybody does that. It might be of limited use for unexpectedhazard, but frankly, unexpectedhazard is an exception, not a representative example of most people.
We all know google search has been shit for longer than two years, it’s just that before 2023 you could at least eventually find what you were looking for. These days, you can’t even do that.
Oops I misread your message. I interpreted you as saying that they had it backwards, meaning they thought it excluded everything before 2023.
It also makes a difference for historical, medical knowledge and basically everything tha you can attach an affiliate link onto (e.g. product reviews), so… My guess is that covers a huge amount of searches.
and basically everything tha you can attach an affiliate link onto (e.g. product reviews)
Y’know, something you’d want up to date results for so you’re not potentially buying older worse products.
I get what you’re saying, but"older doesn’t necessary mean “worse”.
I’m a computer guy, 90% of the things I’m gonna wanna see reviews for are ABSOLUTELY things where older means worse. A review of a year+ old cpu, for example, is absolutely meaningless to me, I wanna see how good the bleeding edge stuff performs.
I’m a “computer guy” as well and I don’t nearly have the need for all he bleeding edge stuff. Especially for server, budget/used options, homelabs and open source software (where the drivers aren’t optimized yet), older hardware is way enough for the job.
Sure, but I don’t need reviews for that stuff. I would’ve already seen those when they were actually, y’know, new.
The bleeding edge stuff isn’t stuff I personally need nor can afford. I just like learning about the newest and greatest tech.
But it does mean that the reviews you based your decisions on are for old models (that may have sense been upgraded or changed) or discontinued products.
It seems like every new product is worse than shit that was out 5 years ago anyway. Less functional, shorter lifespan, etc. Especially electronics.
Sadly, most of my searches need more recent answers. Software, hardware, and local businesses change quickly and old information usually ends up being just wrong.
Google is really, really letting me down and wasting a lot of my time these days.
I get that people think that but I just googled a really long serial number for a washing machine with no other context and the first result was the repair manual. So at least in my experience it seems to be okay.
I agree that certain types of searches work, and that for many of them limiting your results to past content can be useful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the searches I tend to make. I edited my comment to clarify.
I feel like Google’s crap results predate the AI tech by at least five years. It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
I feel so bad for the younger folks these days.
Way back when, if Google couldn’t find it and we did some good Google Fu, it probably wasn’t readily available online.
Now, you know it probably is there, just buried in nonsense generated purely by layer after layer of people’s selfishness. And they never even knew it could be any other way.
Google has also disabled some of the search operators that made refining results more useful.
Like I don’t think the minus operator to exclude a search term works anymore.
Is that a rollout thing? I was just using it last night
Which is the most important one for me. It’s also really useful for filtering SEO crap that has 50,000 keywords attached to every page.
It’s a sick joke that we’ve celebrated being in the “information age” for the last 20-25 years, and now that information is being obfuscated by various means again.
SEO, censorship, paywalls.
Now we have graduated to the disinformation age:-(
Maybe we should start calling disinformation “Lore”
lore-posting time
it’s not the information age, it’s the data age.
Information implies usefulness. Data is just data. Could be right, could be wrong, who knows.
You could say the same thing about information, though. Information doesn’t necessarily imply usefulness. There is an infinitude of information in the universe which is useless to us.
I guess I should have said “correctness” instead of usefulness
It has been garbage SEO stuff for a while.
garbabe SEO has been there since almost the beginning. More recently google started to promote sites base on their profitableness.
Remember when you could suppress sites from Google search results? Due to “unknowable reasons”, they got rid of that feature. Enshittification is real.
Yeah I was looking the other day to block certain sites because every time I google shit I can’t get an answer or it’s just really an add. Along with fucking Qora or whatever it is.
Unfortunately the option is gone
there’s a mozilla extension for that, here is the github page, though it’s also available as extensions to other browsers, including mobile
It does.
Straight out of college in 2015 I did some SEO sidehustling. We’d get blogs writing for cheap by fiverr people, adjusted it a bit, and they ranked high very easily based on certain keywords for the industry. Those blogs were just random bullshit (AI does a better job for a short story), jargon was on point but the content was just snakeoil. Business went thriving.
This unironically is what I/my peers do with resume/cover letters for job/internship applications nowadays. My friend actually has a decent beer moneymaker for building optimized resumes for other people on campus.
The whole system we’re playing in is so fucked.
nothing you do in the system will do anything but dig you in deeper.
My buddy needs help doing this with his resume. He works in IT. Think you could help him out? He’d pay, of course.
Sorry, it’s my friend who does it, not me, and I can tell you right now his clients are dumb finance/business bros, not tech.
All he does is throw the job description into some version of chatGPT to generate a cover letter, and edit it around to make it relevant to the person’s skills and sound like a human wrote it. Then he reduces the resume down to one page. Usually this is enough to get them into the group interview (according to him).
Basic stuff to tech oriented people but this shit is still a mystery to so many college kids/recent grads.
Roger, thanks for the insight! It seems that the job market is difficult at the moment for experienced tech folks. My friend has been talking about paying several hundred to a company who does similar resume editing, and they guarantee an interview in 30 days. IT has never been this rough in the 13-ish years I’ve been in the field.
I don’t know where you live and how bad it is there, but I just got my new job (software architecture) and I specifically asked in my interviews how to improve my resume. The final version was the culmination of all this feedback and got me the perfect job for me, as it makes use of every skill and strength I have.
The two most important points for my resume:
- As some companies use AI for filtering out candidates, don’t do anything fancy, no double columns or star ratings, just write text separated by headers.
- the first page was more like a profile page from a website, where I present relevant general technical and social skills, specific domain knowledge and examples from previous jobs that are relevant for this position. And just from page 2 onward is the usual stuff like education, internships, languages, etc.
It was a lot of work to tailor the cover letter and resume to every posting, but I had much more interviews than when I started and sent out the generic version to a multitude of postings. So in the end it was roughly the same time I invested, with less applications, but more interviews, tailored to my interests and skills.
For reference, this is the style I used for my resume. Hope that helps your friend!
I really like the format of this. Thanks for sharing, and you look like a really solid candidate.
I couldn’t help but notice this at the bottom, “References and other document’s available”.
When it should read: “References and other documents available “The apostrophe in “document’s” suggests that the documents are in possession or have ownership of something.
I see you speak Hindi as well as English, so for the record, I could not draft such a great resume myself in Hindi.
But the SEO garbage sites active up to 2023 have updated since 2023 to keep up with each other.
So it works really well.
Woah, with 5 years you guessed correct, google decided to kill search accuracy for profits 5 years ago, in 2019
Yes, but the SEO methods and Google’s ranking methods have been evolving together over time. Meaning SEO used in content from some time ago may have less impact on the results you see today. Of course, this is just a hypothesis based on a thing I read a few months ago that I can’t even tell you the name of lol
dead internet theory is becoming more and more real
I was using Kagi, but I’m not sure I can justify $10/month for search results that weren’t that great. DuckDuckGo is basically Bing. I do love Qwant because their results felt really good to me, but they won’t let me use it without an ad blocker.
What’s an alternative that gets actually good results?
Just imagine - everyone who write content that’s worth anything these days start dating their newest posts as if they were written in 2023, creating a community within still frame of a better time. It’s like Old School RuneScape, but for the internet.
Many Google users are reporting that their results are not as good as they used to be.
If you’re suffering from this annoying problem don’t worry. Simply follow the steps below.
- Install Driver Easy.
- Run Driver Easy.
- Pay for Driver Easy.
It won’t fix your problem obviously, but here we are on the front page of the search results for every fucking Windows problem regardless.
And then SEO optimiser add the tag “before:2023”
Thanks, I hate it.
I know its a joke but using Google dorks has always been the most effective way of searching. There was a period of like 4 or a bit more years where you didn’t need them anymore because engines actually got good. Now though they’re more useful than ever.
The new episode of the Better Offline podcast is the first in a three part series on the death of the web. I’m halfway through and would recommend it. It’s a good show just in general.
Is this podcast available online?
No you have to ask around and get it on kasette
No you have to send a postcard to a PO box and then they send you back a cassette tape. With a free pencil to fix it when it inevitably unravels.
nowadays, all tabs look like the shopping tab
I would love to hack the local shitty news source and stick a shopping cart on their page…
Nothing more, just subtle criticism to see how long it lasts
also the shopping tab, if you’re actually shopping, is completely fucking useless.
Commercialization of everything.
That’s what inevitably happens when you give a mega corp like Google all of that power over you, your life, and your data by simply using their products. Ultimately, they then get to decide who you are and how you act. And it’s in their benefit to shape everything, including you, in their corporate image.
People don’t notice how much they’re getting fucked on an individual basis until the consequences of the actions of millions or billions of people adds up and comes back around in the form of something stupid and obvious like Manifest V3, SEO everywhere, WEI, or the doublespeak “privacy sandbox” comes to bite you in the ass. Enshittification everywhere and even then most people still don’t care.
We’re their cattle and we’re choosing to walk into a slaughterhouse with our eyes wide open. In more ways than one. As fun as the game is, I really do not want to actually live in Cyberpunk.
ive been saying this for 20+ years, and people still don’t fucking listen. fuck, apple users still exist!
also: what about a ‘shadowrun’ campaign gm’d by a severely concussed Kurt Vonnegut as he dies of dysentery at the table?
but i don’t use google search
This has the bonus side effect of being able to ignore any news that happened since 2023 to gaslight yourself into thinking that we’re not all living in a hellscape of a world
You’d need to go back to pre 2012 for that
Little further than that. Further… Keep going until you see fish legs.
Before 2007 gets one well before the 2007 financial collapse.
I think the news in 2022 was still pretty hellish. I’m going to go with (before:2013). Some hell still, but a naively optimistic hell
Probably more poverty/starvation but a fraction of the climate change?
way fewer active genocides and all of them trying to fly under the radar.
No the news from 2024 is an improvement over the news from 2023. Moderately anyway
Works great for old stuff, now how do I look up stuff on the bridge collapse near me last week?
go to the actual site, it’s near you.
Oh good I am sure I can find out the eta of when the bypass will be built from the broken bridge.
You can’t do shit about it either way …
ask the workers working there. easy peasy *thumbs up
I started switching everything to duckduckgo. So far it’s been a much better experience.
I set DDG as my default a while back and I’m finding myself having to open Google all the time to get results.
Bing
DDG gets their results from Bing
