Web searching died the day they invented SEO You can find anything on the internet apart from the specific thing you're looking for. No wonder the boffins at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center are bigging up the enormity of the task of decoding data from its recently rediscovered zombie satellite. They probably did a web search for the old system and came up with a blank …
Also this one: if you're looking for some technical stuff, not only code, and is starting to get desperate, search for "title of a book or manual" pdf.
You'll get dozens of results of either register for FREE to get "title of a book or manual" from the USENET!!1! or sites like wer87fbwauebfygc.blog.com with messages like we have "title of a book or manual" cheap from Canadian pharmacies or find dozens of single "title of a book or manual" in your neighborhood or here is the secret of a bigger, harder, long-duration "title of a book or manual"...
What a world, we can't even trust the pirates :-)
dwarfed by human ignorance, arrogance and cute cat videos
"1 out of 3 ain't bad"..
(I have a nice video of the damage that one of my cats did to my arm.. Note to self: when trying to get a 7kg semi-feral male cat into a cage for his vets appointment, remember to wear bike leathers. And make sure that plenty of hot running water is available and that towels are down to soak up the blood..)
Actually, I find that the first ten pages invariably turn out to be either from Pinterest (which I'd prefer banned from my results in perpetuity considering a) it's always utterly irrelevant b) wants me to register even to give me the time of the day), Alibaba (for which I, not being an en-gros merchant with Eastern proclivities have precisely zero use, ever) or some site aggregating "best deals" from half of the retailers on the internet (bonus: if, accidentally, it advertises exactly the item I'm looking for, it turns out the affiliate link is expired or the item is no longer sold by the actual retailer who pretends to have never even heard of it).
Oh, and the best part? As far as I know, there is no such thing as "operator" or "boolean", at least not on Google. The only thing they let you do is put your terms in quotes to (hopefully) search for exact expression. "Plus" means nothing. "AND" means nothing (guess what, "OR" works - because it doesn't impede Googles ability to shove MORE unrelated garbage down your throat - but it's useless, because it's on by default either way). You wanted BOTH your search terms mandatory? Tough luck, sunshine, we don't have the technology for that. Not any more...
The OR operator does work, and the AND operator is redundant, if you want to search for cat and hats you can just search for cats hats instead of cats AND hats.
You want both to be mandatory? "cats" "hats".
As with many things, learning to use a tool properly will give you better results than just shouting at it.
I remember when Google killed logical operators to "make search results faster". I am guessing that is when "pay to play" SEO went into overdrive.
Google's attitude was that we wanted some results quicker rather than the results we expected.
Used to be one could use "NOT" to exclude a word. I could get very relevant results. Talking 1995-6.
Now you get crap and if I try to limit the crap, that action apparently triggers a reaction from the search engine and I get worse crap.
Would be nice to have front end that could do the boolean logic on the search results and then filter the crap, like a mashup of DuckDuckGo and AdBlocker.
@DropBear what I find really great about Google is, when I have bought a product and I am looking for the handbook or a tutorial (explicitly searching for "product handbook" or "how do I use product" type queries), I just get pages and pages of deals on buying the product I already have and want more information about...
Although it seem to go in cycles, sometimes it does actually return useful information for a few weeks, then it drops back to just listing shopping deals.
"Actually, I find that the first ten pages invariably turn out to be either from Pinterest "
-pinterest.* -ebay.* -shutterstock.* search term
Now, if there was a way to make that ( + other sites!) permanent across all device. Maybe I'll have to do my own Google front page which lets me add/remove those and then passes the resulting search term to google?
And the computers to run it on.
They've just misplaced both of them. And the eight folks who know how to build the necessary system, should they actually find 'em again, are still on the payroll. NASA can even cobble together the rest of the necessary ground systems from existing parts ... But doing all of that wouldn't increase the budget, now would it?
You're right about search engines. I should never have sold my portal ...
NASA warehouses probably have also the Ark of the Covenant somewhere, a black monolith, alongside the original good-res tapes recorded in Australia of the Moon landing, and I think also some alien messages offering to share millions of zuwhqiw if you reply and help them (if you do, they abduct you with a beam of light, of course).
Just nobody really knows where they are any longer. They should ask archeologist to dig in them, and neatly catalog all the findings. These are also the kind of people who may still have some of the devices needed to read the tapes...
The same archeologists you may need soon to find something that was left on the Internet long ago....
Yet, I wish SEO could extinct soon like dinosaurs, hit by a huge electronic asteroids, and only found in some ancient Internet layer - below IP.
NASA warehouses probably have also the Ark of the Covenant somewhere, a black monolith, alongside the original good-res tapes recorded in Australia of the Moon landing, and I think also some alien messages offering to share millions of zuwhqiw if you reply and help them (if you do, they abduct you with a beam of light, of course).
And the missing Doctor Who and Dad's Army episodes, and, oddly enough, the 1950 TV production of "Miss Mabel"
Why all the talk about archeologists? The IMAGE satellite has only been silent for 13 years, FFS! If you look at the hardware the thing was built from (here), everything on it, except data gathering instruments, is off the shelf. It communicates in a bog-standard way with NASA's so-called "deep space network". There is absolutely no reason NASA shouldn't be able to re-open communications with the thing overnight.
And THAT might be the real story. Is whatever passes for a supposedly dead bird's project management incompetent? Do they not understand that they already have the capability?
Fire up the PDP8 in the museum.
No need, they're on FPGAs now...https://opencores.org/project,pdp8,features
Ho hum, does anyone have any old Fortran manuals?
2nd item in my Google search: http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-10-AFDO-D%20decsystem10%20FORTRAN%20IV%20Programmer%27s%20Reference%20Manual.pdf
Now, what were you saying about not being able to find anything on The Internet?
(or maybe it's just that Google has learned what I like to search for?)
"Fire up the PDP8 in the museum."
When someone domated am ancient IBM mainframe to the Computer History Museum they wanted to try to get it working again but, of course, no-one was still using/supporting that model ... so someone suggested they get an article put in the IBM pensiioners newsletter asking if anyone whi'd worked on this would like to help get one running again ... and within days they had dozens of volunteers.
The Internet isn't really that full of stuff that was around before it started to get big. Searching for anything from before 2000 is increasingly difficult, and what you do find tends to be enthusiast-generated and full of errors. Often a wrong number can be traced back to a single source that has been copied multiple times.
I was looking the other day for information on semi-Diesel engines (because I am sad and do not have a life etc.) to supplement what I have in my 1950s textbooks. The number of errors online was quite extraordinary, and this is a technology which was still in use into the 1960s (and there may still be a narrowboat or two with such an engine). If I want to know more it'll probably mean a trip to Cambridge, which still keeps all the textbooks going back to Theory and Practice of Large Ark Manufacture, AUP BC 2540, Noah et al.
And then there's bit rot, unmaintained pages and stuff hosted on servers that have since been turned off.
"Searching for anything from before 2000 is increasingly difficult, [...]"
Not many years ago I used to use Google to find my prior postings on a subject so I could use copy&paste in a new similar posting. Nowadays it usually comes up with "not found".
If I find it by other means there is no apparent reason why it wasn't found by the search - assuming it was looking.
Two WIBNIY*** enhancements to the El Reg comment facility.
1) search through ones own previous postings
2) mark a posting in "My Posts" if someone has replied to it.
***Wouldn't It Be Nice If You..."
Searching for anything from before 2000 is increasingly difficult,
Not if you are looking for information on certain things, then you suddenly enter a museum or twilight world of 'the land the internet forgot' where all the pages are from the turn of the century and the information questionable as to whether still relevant.
Example : Search for 'Window Managers' and suddenly find yourself there.
"Searching for anything from before 2000 is increasingly difficult"
"what you do find tends to be enthusiast-generated and full of errors"
and, from the article
"Rather than showing what you're searching for, search results show you links that marketeers want you click on instead. The whole point of SEO today is to direct you to content you don't want and didn't ask for."
That's pretty much the general frustration experience, yeah.
As for the 2nd point, "what you do find tends to be enthusiast-generated and full of errors", <sarcasm>I'll step on a land mine and blame net neutrality</sarcasm>. heh.
Trolling, trolling, la, la-la, la-la, whenever I throw in my line, a fish will come to call... [to the tune of 'sailing sailing' if it wasn't already obvious]
troll icon, because, obvious
Maybe it will get better again someday...
My CRT fades. The video dims. All that remains is low memory. I remember a time of advertising, ruined searches, this wasted bandwidth.
But most of all, I remember the web warrior, the man we called Max. To understand who he was we have to go back to the other time, when the world was powered by SEO searches and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel — gone now, swept away.
For reasons long forgotten a mighty warrior tribe went into a search engine war against the people and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without SEO searches they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering advertising based engines sputtered and stopped.
Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem the avalanche of lost adevertising revenue. Their world crumbled. Cities exploded — a whirlwind of boolean searches, a firestorm of results the users acutally wanted. Men began to feed on good search results.
On the web it was a command line nightmare. Only those capable enough to provide specific search criteria, brutal enough to leverage boolean repressions would survive. The gangs took over the net, ready to wage war for an accurate result, and in this maelstrom of decay ordinary men were battered and smashed — men like Max, the web warrior Max.
In the roar of a SEO search engine, he lost everything he had searched for and became a shell of a man, a burnt-out desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past failed search results, a man who wandered out into the web wasteland.
And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to search again.
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"Quote marks? Such a pain."
Giving a search engine the exact phrase in quotes rarely returns any correct matches. It doesn't help that the algorithms seem to remove any significant characters like dots or apostrophes first.
Recently some YouTube searches have started coming up with "0 results" for the names of groups - yet still happily display all the group's old videos on their own YouTube page
It is not a case of an "exact match" - as on other similarly constructed search terms they come up with very vague matches ahead of the expected ones.
I've always assumed that when you get the "missing {term}" stuff first it's because there are too many muppets searching for stuff with irrelevant terms. The reason you can't find good hits for "bog Snorkling" is because loads of people want to find snorkles and for some reason search "bog standard snorkling".
Or something about page rank escalating faster than relevance, but I imagine muppets are more plausible.
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