The Verge shows how Google search is useless
The Verge shows how Google search is useless
After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale.
The Verge published this spam article about the "best printers of 2024" to demonstrate how terrible Google's search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search "best printer" on Google.
I love a good, informative troll.
In my recent experience, it recommends shitty blogs loaded with adverts and keywords. Most annoyingly, it always recommends Fandom’s Wiki above better alternative wiki sites. My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.
That aside, my Brother laser printer is still working great. No complaints.
The demise of google search is by design. https://www.techspot.com/news/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-why-accused-killing-google-search.html TL;DR. Management noted that search revenue was not growing, so the head of google search Prabhakar Raghavan made it worse so you have to click more to get what you want. More clicks = more money = growth = happy investors = enshitification. Fuck you Prabhakar Raghavan.
I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and "portal crud". ...and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.
Sometimes Google's results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.
From the article...
Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
I have to admit, it was an interesting read, not quite like anything I've ever read before, for a review.
I honestly can't tell if this is just some genius way of sliding in some AI generated content into a review and getting it to pass our review, or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated with Google's search algorithm paying attention to manipulation by others, so trying to really get their stuff out there for us to see.
Either way, it's definitely worth the read.
As far as Brother printers go, I own an all-in-one laser that's over a decade old, and it's still going strong. And it actually works with Linux to boot. I do hate though that they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early, but if you mask sensors and such, then an existing toner will work forever.
Google used to list sites with backlinks highly, it was their first ever search algorithm iirc. Once people learned you could game that by planting useless backlinks, Google realised it was a bad idea.
Somehow, they've reinvented this all over again with parasite SEO that fundamentally works the same way. All they did was add some "domain ranking". Now, unreliable-but-popular sites coughredditcough will always score highly regardless of quality, because Google deemed them superior.
Can confirm, it's still the top result under the sponsors. And it's an amusing read.
With the prevalence of reddit google was of the most useful tools I've seen in my 40 years on earth. Only to go to absolute shit in the last 2-3 years.
Best breadcrumb from article:
I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these [SEO/Google] people making money off of everyone else’s misery?
This was actually a very funny read.
Also yes, Brother printers are the best because they actually work.
Sigh. So many things in the world are like this. It’s not a bad idea, in theory, to favor more recent pages in search results. Finding 4 year old information is often not what you want. But in practice, when everyone knows this bias exists, they just fiddle with their pages daily to try to fool the algorithm. It must be aggravating to be Google, because as smart as they are, the entire world is engaged in an unending and ruthless quest to game their results for personal gain.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s been over a year since I last told you to just buy a Brother laser printer, and that article has fallen down the list of Google search results because I haven’t spent my time loading it up with fake updates every so often to gain the attention of the Google search robot.
Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting!
Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one.
Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.
Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.
Brother laser printers are strong contenders, especially for black and white printing needs, but weigh the pros and cons against other options like inkjets before deciding.
The original article contains 428 words, the summary contains 239 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I don't think Google can be blamed too much for presenting an article from a relevant, generally trustworthy site, that has the search query as the article title.
