talkative fishy

@blackle

blackle is a shark

it/its
suricrasia.online/

also on the fediverse.

bsky: @blackle.bsky.social

all my crimes can be found with the tag #blackleposting

I'm a director at the Queer Computer Club in Toronto. I also run Suricrasia Online

Avatar by @dusk@yiff.life

talkative fishy @blackle12/6/2022, 7:43 PM

eblu @eblu

eblu @eblu12/6/2022, 4:42 PM

okay yep search engines are legitimately unusable now

I'm scrolling through the results for something that I'm interested in learning more about and I can't tell which ones are actually real sources and which ones are made by underpaid copywriters who don't have a single clue what they're talking about and are only there to drive up ad revenue by gaming SEO

edit: some people have brought up some possible solutions/alternate search engines to address this problem so I'm going to list them here:

add "before:2017" to your search to limit the date range (caveat: nothing published within the last five years will show up in the results)
look it up on tiktok? (caveat: you're looking it up on tiktok)
uBlacklist; filters out specific sites from your search results (caveat: no filter is 100% perfect so you may end up having to sift through everything anyway)
bring web directories back (caveat: this hasn't happened yet, someone's gotta do it)
add "reddit" to your search query (caveat: this only returns results from reddit. you will also have to go on reddit)
Marginalia Search; an experimental search engine that prioritizes text-heavy sites over ones with modern web design (caveat: I'm not really sure if there is one just yet but it seems to be running at a bit of a loss at the moment and is maintained by just one guy)

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in reply to @eblu's post:

SGTCharlynne @SGTCharlynne12/6/2022, 4:48 PM

It's why I have to slap in the "before:2017" search operation whenever I'm searching a question or something

🌊@wave12/6/2022, 11:04 PM

ohh that's elegant. i usually don't mess with date specification outside of "within last month" etc. because the gui for it so bothersome.

Being Brin @brnn12/6/2022, 4:53 PM

Literaly tiktok searching the same question is the way to go

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct12/6/2022, 5:21 PM

google "fastest way to determine if elements of an array are unique" and the first result is this fucking shit

eevee @lexyeevee12/6/2022, 7:49 PM

holy moly this reads like parody. there is technically a semi-usable correct answer in there but you have to already know which thing it is

The World's Largest Mammal @worldslargestmammal12/6/2022, 6:09 PM

looking for anything computer-related and half the results are compareit.to - 2022 C Programming Language vs Neopets Compare Pros Cons

Krishean Draconis @krishean12/6/2022, 8:16 PM

i tried to click on that to see if it was a link, just to see how bad it could possibly be

it's pretty awful that that's not far enough from reality to be able to recognize as satire

spitfire @spitfire12/6/2022, 7:30 PM

not even copywriters, it's literally all just AI-generated content now

ArBe @arbe12/6/2022, 7:50 PM

It's both, the sad part is they're virtually indistinguishable

Ξ @exerian12/6/2022, 7:54 PM

which is why i always laugh when people talk about how long it will take to get to human level ai. honey, we already there.

inbtwn @inbtwn12/7/2022, 3:01 AM

"(caveat: this hasn't happened yet, someone's gotta do it)" uh, buddy,

https://curlie.org
https://ooh.directory (for blogs, but still)

rykarn @rykarn12/27/2022, 4:57 PM

Thanks for suggesting uBlacklist, going to give that a try. I get so annoyed whenever I search for a programming question and end up on yet another stackoverflow scraper site or other such garbage.