Search results

Anyone else has trouble finding quality results on search engines?

Like searching for something vaguely general, how to fix a window, how to market a book, how to make this and that.

It used to be so great for the last decades, even with the ads. A few useful articles starting into practical next steps were always on the first or second page, lately though... Top results lead to pages full of AI generated fluffpieces. And I waste literal hours to read one or two paragraphs to detect on my own, the whole thing is an oversimplified nothing. Additional AI generated images, cut through the flurry of ads and cookie consent popups (hello, early 2000s, how are you nowadays?) with dark patterns "enhancing the experience".

Don't get me wrong, it is awesome that tech lowers the bar for entry and we can create and consume more knowledge, art and entertainment than ever in history. Unfortunate side-effect, the quality of entry is lowered too. And it is perfectly fine that websites needs monetization methods too. Having said that...

While it is a daily need for me to search due to my work, hobby and lifestyle, I actually neglected to consciously improve my search results until now. I have some luck, my native language is not yet fully supported by the generative AIs so if I can, revert back to it to search for what I need, usually get better quality content.

However many of us is not that lucky or simply, there are way more diverse sources in english out there. Lately I started to use the extra tag, before:YYYY-MM-DD with my searches, aiming for content made before 2022-01-01. At least until I get more grasp of a topic to ask deeper questions which naturally lead to better results. Until we get a "not-ai-generated" search tag, we can learn a bit more of these: https://static.semrush.com/blog/uploads/files/39/12/39121580a18160d3587274faed6323e2.pdf

Back to stackoverflow, "how to fix..."...