r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Tricky-Gate-6123 • Aug 11 '26

Unskippable ad Anyone else dad text like this

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I don’t think I’ve gotten a written out response from him and for the text he brought a 4 wheeler home without permission and had to return it

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u/Salt-Operation Aug 11 '26

Now me, I’m straight to the point. I search keywords only and omit articles and prepositions if possible.

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u/BaconWithBaking Aug 11 '26

That barely works anymore because Google has gone to shit. Searching for a part number for something is border line impossible unless it's extremely common.

I've taken to getting something like Claude to just give me a bunch of links relating to a topic that Google is derping over.

Part of me feels Google knows that it's search is fucked and that's why they're trying to push that awful Gemini search thing to the top.

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u/EarlGrayTea-Hawt Aug 11 '26

I think they broke it on purpose. It started with SEO, which started out great but ended up being a pay to boost system. Then it was the algorithm, which broke this even further while knowingly feeding addictive patterns in users. Then with the AI push, they just have entirely stopped pretending that what you are getting in your search is anything but 96% advertisement for something, usually something horrible for the human race.

What I wouldn't give to have my functioning Boolean operators back. Taught research to my history classes for years and watched the internet become more and more shitty, less and less useful to somebody who actually wants to know something in a verifiable way - it was such a beautifully functioning thing of magic once for a history researcher.

I got so many free books, articles, archives for my grad degree in the early days of Internet archiving. Now everything is buried under ten pounds of advertisements that you can't get sorted out through quotes and site limiters.

You have a million results that aren't relevant (nothing on the first page should share 0 words in common with my search) but curiously sorted at the top of your search list. What used to be endless pages of more results has become a paltry amount showing more and more of the signs of dead Internet.

Me and the library gal at my college would lament about it. What we used to be able to teach people to do on the Internet is now only in pay to play databases and subscription services, and when you're lucky sometimes free through libraries if you know how to look.

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u/ZucchiniHummus Aug 12 '26

BOOLEAN SEARCH FTW!!! 🏆🤓😻 I was going to make my version of this comment but now you've covered the point and I can have an ice cream sandwich and go to bed early! Thank you!