2023-07-16 20:09 UTC
Replies (40)
-
@eaton@phire.place 2023-07-16 20:10
Even if you find the manufacturer's site it’s more likely than not broken, with a search feature that pulls up what it claims are results but empty divs instead of links, or busted jQuery code from 2013 that prevents anything from loading. Is it a real but broken site? Is it just another click farm? Does it matter?
-
@tim@phire.place 2023-07-16 20:13
@eaton@phire.place it does this with scholarly papers too
-
@morten_skaaning@mastodon.gamedev.place 2023-07-16 20:18
@eaton@phire.place a common tradegy...
-
@bioluminescently@disabled.social 2023-07-16 20:23
@eaton@phire.place This is also why it's such a problem that independent websites are now falling so far down search engine rankings. When I was younger, if you had a problem with A Thing from a larger category of Things, you'd go to a website run by some Thing Enthusiast or group of them, and look your Thing up in the site's index or inbuilt search box. If it wasn't there, you'd post on the site's forum and another Thing Owner might help. But now... good luck even finding out that indie site exists.
-
@guiltmanager@gm-cloud.org.uk 2023-07-16 20:26
@eaton@phire.place or sites that claim to have it but dont at all but want to serve you ads or show you something completely unrelated. frustrating as hell.
-
@fuegon@mstdn.party 2023-07-16 20:34
@eaton@phire.place honestly this is less of an internet problem, and more of a corporations forcibly making the internet their personal playground
-
@mhanes@tech.lgbt 2023-07-16 20:37
@eaton@phire.place this was one of (name redacted)'s hustle in uni until they actually got a take down letter from eBay
-
@niavy@masto.bike 2023-07-16 20:41
@eaton@phire.place I HATE IIIIIIT
-
@nicol@social.coop 2023-07-16 20:53
@eaton@phire.place I often wonder what a federated DMOZ would look like? Experts curating the links they know about together, combined building the index-of-everything-but-peer-reviewed.
-
@stevensrmiller@mastodon.sdf.org 2023-07-16 20:56
@eaton@phire.place Close cousin is the practice some vendors have of flooding the web with fake counterfeiters. If you want an "Eames" aluminum group chair, you are going to find hundreds of sites that sell them, except... there's no "add to cart" button anywhere.
-
@delfuego@me.dm 2023-07-16 21:25
@eaton@phire.place Holy hell you hit THIS nail on the head. We bought our house, with appliances, in 2006, and in the past month, two of them began signaling that they were not much longer for this mortal coil. It was an ABSOLUTELY PAINFUL experience hunting for their manuals online, and Google returning tons of sites that actually didn't have them, or that had done unspeakably horrible things to the content.
-
@markrod@mstdn.social 2023-07-16 22:01
@eaton@phire.place this is one of the many symptoms that we are in the #enshittification #singularity, part of the even more hideous #Polycrisis, long a prediction from near future dystopian sci fi, as in Gibson’s #jackpot
-
@bgrinter@mastodon.sdf.org 2023-07-16 22:11
@eaton@phire.place new tech I download the manual straight away and shred the paper one. Old stuff I keep in drawers. I should scan some day. I could put online but would probably get sued
-
@cozymel@tech.lgbt 2023-07-16 22:21
@eaton@phire.place same with travel content. I've seen a single article that said a city was safe while the entire country it is in is unsafe but also the entire city is unsafe any time of day but certain neighborhoods are safe even at night and I was like: this is obviously AI "generated" (scraped from the web and randomly plastered together)
-
@chrisc41@techhub.social 2023-07-16 22:28
@eaton@phire.place ugh, I feel this
-
@gregmillerwrites@zirk.us 2023-07-16 22:43
@eaton@phire.place I find it ironic that the phrase, "It is what it is" came into general usage just around the same time as nothing was any longer what it was. Just what is anything anymore?
-
@adamcrussell@mastodon.sdf.org 2023-07-16 22:49
@eaton@phire.place Isn't that more a failure of the search engine you're using? Being able to reduce the score (and visibility) of crap and increase the visibility of quality information in your searches is what Page Rank is supposed to do. Presumably the algorithms now favor showing your more ads from the search engines advertising business than high quality results!
-
@ish@mindly.social 2023-07-16 23:10
@eaton@phire.place @irenes@mastodon.social Of course, it’s not just the 90s, or repair manuals, but anything that can be remotely monetized by camping on a term. And AI is only going to accelerate the trend, by making it faster and more plausible and harder for search engines to differentiate… if they are even bothered to try.
-
@frost@chitter.xyz 2023-07-16 23:25
@eaton@phire.place "Pay us $1.99 to download this manual!"
-
@JStatePost@newsie.social 2023-07-16 22:05
@eaton@phire.place 🥥 The #Aristocrats! 🥥
-
@deviantintegral@drupal.community 2023-07-16 23:55
@eaton@phire.place I’ve gone back to downloading manuals as soon as I find them, instead of assuming they’ll be online for the foreseeable future. Sometimes I can’t even find the Canadian variant of a manual and have to use one from another region. We’re using https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/ for managing them (as well as scanned correspondence etc) and it’s pretty good. I get way better results and less ai generated spam with Kagi.com instead of Google. You can block whole domains with two clicks!
-
@unexpectedteapot@social.linux.pizza 2023-07-17 00:14
@eaton@phire.place this isn't a failure of the internet though, is it? This is the failure of the technology that pushes specific software on the user such as Google search being the default. Browsers and smart phones that are designed to make certain service providers much easier to rely on and more accessible. It is the product of massive investments of capital that eventually leads to monopolies and oligopolies that are self-serving rather than demanding the needs of the collective.
-
@DeweyOxberger@techhub.social 2023-07-17 00:19
@eaton@phire.place which should have been completely easy for an algorithm to detect and not display that site. But for the advertising
-
@irizoris@hcommons.social 2023-07-17 00:24
@eaton@phire.place YouTube has a monopoly on user and repair manuals of all eras. Except not in print. 😔
-
@mcbridejc@mstdn.social 2023-07-17 00:25
@eaton@phire.place I hate this so much, and I think a big part of the answer is to figure out how to dry up ad revenues. A great place to start would be to outright ban the use of user data for targetting advertisement.
-
@pkce@mastodon.gamedev.place 2023-07-17 00:46
@eaton@phire.place Google used to be so useful, now it's trash since people are gaming it and google pushes ads to the top of the list. I miss forums and wikis. The internet had so much potential before it became primarily a vehicle for consumption instead of knowledge sharing
-
@jake4480@c.im 2023-07-17 00:54
@eaton@phire.place absolutely. All the analytics and obsession with SEO and buying ads on search destroyed it, by boosting the attention-seeking liar results to the top every time someone searches. It's the MOST frustrating garbage.
-
@textfiles@digipres.club 2023-07-17 01:08
@eaton@phire.place come visit internet archive
-
@Ecopolitidae@mas.to 2023-07-17 01:27
@eaton@phire.place AI is accelerating its self-destruction.
-
@nbomb@mas.to 2023-07-17 01:51
@eaton@phire.place I wonder if being able to up or down vote search results a la Reddit would be beneficial or not…
-
@jo@gts.zzncx.top 2023-07-17 01:56
@eaton@phire.place I searched for a manual and came upon a site that presented a PDF with ad links in it. And its not even a manual book, just a PDF with ad links. :blobhaj_glare:
-
@rjmrn11@me.dm 2023-07-17 01:59
@eaton@phire.place This is one of the things I was hoping the new things like Bing's next AI search would help with, but the internet is just awful for finding things now
-
@Coop22@mindly.social 2023-07-17 02:19
@eaton@phire.place don't really disagree but I think it is important to realize that with some discipline you can get what you really need really fast on the internet. Like, for example, I wanted to know how to troubleshoot my broken washer and 3 videos later I realized my washer was f*&;Ed. In the 90s I would have tried to repair it for like 38 more hours before realizing I was ultimately f%$&Ed.
-
@Syulang@aus.social 2023-07-17 03:21
@eaton@phire.place the internet has real human value... But I'm old enough to remember it before it good ad-revenued, SEOed and algorithmically generated "content" up the wazoo. It definitely had more human interaction, handcrafted resources, and public spaces of real value.
-
@JoeCotellese@jawns.club 2023-07-17 03:26
@eaton@phire.place that seems like more of a failure of search engines
-
@humansriseup@ioc.exchange 2023-07-17 03:28
@eaton@phire.place Use a Torrent. You might find it. I got an owners manual for 1979 Kawasaki KZ 1000 on a torrent. It helped a lot. Even though it was in Russian. I needed the wiring diagram. 🚫🤡
-
@otheorange_tag@mstdn.social 2023-07-17 03:50
@eaton@phire.place I say this all the time, we need the late 90s style search engines using regexpr like stuff, and nothing else. I used to be able to repair old tech. Thing is, we can still do this. We just need a huge database to walk the web, just like the old days. Wonder if we can get enough un-effed-with pages
-
@caffeinatedbookdragon@libranet.de 2023-07-17 03:56
@eaton@phire.place I don't care if they're pricey, I always preferred to get my hands on the actual paper copies of the Haynes auto repair guides when I got a vehicle. Sadly, I couldn't repair my little car if I tried, now, mostly because they have that protective cover to prevent electronics from getting wet now. I used to always have small trucks I could get under and change my own oil, at least, because they sat higher off the ground. I was gonna find a guide for a neighbor's 20 year old truck, but the only option is downloadable for about $40. Sheesh--no wonder people just browse a dozen YouTube vids instead (and hopefully the demonstrator's arm isn't covering the spot you need to see the most...grr...)
-
@randy5235@pdx.social 2023-07-17 04:44
@eaton@phire.place I think search engines are the biggest part of the problem. When you are in the business of making profit, how can engagement and ads not taint the results? We need something akin to a peer reviewed Dewey Decimal System. We need knowledge organization processes not carnival barkers.
-
@ellenor2000@mastodon.top 2023-07-17 04:58
@eaton@phire.place Yeah