this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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chapotraphouse

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This is getting ridiculous.

Also anyone else notice that google now censors most search results about drugs? They give you their fucking suicide hotline as the top result if you mention anything harder than weed. After that, it's all DEA and DOJ webpages, literal DARE shit, actual rehab advertisements, and massively SEO'd rehab related grifts. Good luck getting any Bluelight or Erowid pages to come up without actively searching for them nowadays.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago

Did you mean * completely different search * because that's what these results are

[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Actually Google just changed it. You gotta put three brackets on each side of each word now.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago

Doing all of your searches in antisemitic scare quotes because otherwise the search engine ignores your query

[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I used to love double quotes because that technique worked so well. Then one day I realized google was getting to be more and more like their Youtube website. Like Youtube - Google was giving me "help" that I in no way wanted. And - of course - google doesn't offer a plain vanilla search option to disable. "Helping" is forced enabled.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

is there a way to search youtube videos by date range?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I don't know but at google you can use before: and/or after:.

kangaroo attack after:2015-01-01 before:2016-01-01

So at google videos you could search for

kangaroo attack after:2015-01-01 before:2016-01-01 site:youtube.com

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago

Oh my lord the drug stuff is beyond infuriating. If I'm looking up how to abuse a substance, giving me endless rehab ads and helplines is just gonna make me abuse drugs even harder I swear.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Google, I'm just trying to find a out if my new blood pressure meds are going to put me into a coma after my wife and I took 2.5 shots and then she said "Uh hey, TheLepidopterists, is this okay on ?"

I do not need rehab clinic websites with articles about "what do I do if I can't quit heavily drinking on " I just want to know if literally any drinking is extremely dangerous. Had to ask my doctor directly to find out that it was fine as long as I wasn't drinking daily or bingeing. Spent the week in panic.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

you have to use fucking Reddit to find any real information. Otherwise this is all you get:

"low blood pressure" OK here's 200 blog articles about HIGH blood pressure.

"I just took an extra pill of this drug by mistake. Is this dangerous?" OK 200 blog articles saying do not take more than it says to take. WOW

"my arm hurts" OK web MD says arm cancer would hurt.

"ok that doesn't answer my" OK ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor. Ask a doctor.

"how long do you have to wait to take Afrin after the 3 day period?" TAKE AFRIN ONCE EVERY 12 HOURS FOR NOT MORE THAN 3 DAYS

"no but like, I know, but is there like a cooldown period? Do I need to wait a couple weeks? A month? A year?" TAKE AFRIN ONCE EVERY 12 HOURS FOR NOT MORE THAN 3 DAYS

"Has any human being ever purchased Afrin two times during the course of their long lifespan? Is that OK to do?" TAKE AFRIN ONCE EVERY 12 HOURS FOR NOT MORE THAN 3 DAYS

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The ask a doctor shit makes me especially mad, like motherfucker, if I had any sort of timely access to a doctor do you really think I'd be asking fucking google?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Also you'll have much more luck and very likely better information about drugs by speaking to a pharmacist. Many doctors don't know are either hard to contact and/or have have fairly basic drug knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I have a family member who's a pharmacist, the doctors know jack shiiiiiiit about the drugs.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Doctors still think the Naloxone in Suboxone actually prevents people from "abusing it". The patent holder fed them a bunch of bullshit decades ago about how it causes precipitated withdrawal if you snort or IV it instead of using the prescribed sublingual RoA.

But despite the universal experience of people who have snorted and IV'd it being that the Naloxone may as well be inactive due to it having a significantly lower mu-opioid receptor binding affinity than Buprenorphine, doctors still to this day insist on prescribing Suboxone instead of plain Buprenorphine, often at double the cost to the patient.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

Google is bad for your health. Use SearXNG.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yandex is where it’s at, doesn’t censor anything I’ve noticed at least. Drugs and piracy ftw

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

I remember switching from yandex to google 10 years ago because it was way better

where did that bring you? back-to-me

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Yandex makes me do a stupid captcha every time that I can never fucking pass for some reason

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

We're all bots here

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Makes my fans spin up hard as well

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I had no clue they made people do those to use it.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Having to add "reddit" to every search in the hope of getting a remotely human answer and not just 10-20 corporate/government websites rehashing the same information

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

When most subreddits went offline last year, google became absolutely, profoundly useless. That really exposed this issue to a lot of people who actually hadn't noticed before. If I'm a google exec right now, I'd be looking to prop up reddit by any means necessary because at this point if reddit were to ever digg itself permanently, it'd probably take google with it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

That's a great point

The disappointing thing is that there are still some niche forums out there if you know what they're called. But they rarely show up in Google searches

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I search Lemmy these days instead of reddit. Example:

laptop "join lemmy" inurl:post
[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I've been saying for a while now that if someone brought back the fundamental ideas of hyperlinks as an authority-confirming tool of doing search ranking via bot crawlers it's quite possible that they could end up with a better search engine. In particular because the black hats have moved on from manipulating that style of search engine due to it no longer being how Google does things.

I think the most irritating thing is the recency bias Google has now. Sometimes the 15 year old page on a given topic is just better, and should still be the top result on a topic. Google incentivises the entire web to rehash itself over and over and over and over now. Churning out the same shit in different wording over and over again to chase recency bias.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I find alternative search engines to be a lot better about that stuff.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)

And adding reddit to the end so I get real people’s answers

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

The one and only reason that reddit shouldn't yet be scourged from the internet

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

What, are the top results all being barely readable, AI generated spam articles and ad-sponsored or hidden marketing masquerading as reviews and blog posts not good enough for you?

Because if so, ya, that's all we got unless you tailor your search a bunch with stuff like that...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

yep. enshittification in full effect.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

its pretty breathtaking how much google in particular has turned to big pile of dog shit

I also really like digital repositories of libraries and such that ignore quotes and helpfully provide stuff they think you mean, extremely helpful when researching

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

If you use duckduckgo, you can put

!psy

Before your search to be taken directly to the psychonaut wiki page for that search term.

!psych

Directs you to the American psychological association lmao

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

"Give me bluelight or I'm just going to go with my gut on it."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Why do people use Google anymore? I use DDG on a daily basis (which still censors stuff like that to a lesser degree), and Yandex or Startpage if the search includes keywords that are any more controversial than running in a wheat field.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There's also an addon for DDG that lets you block useless websites, improving your search results over time. I'll reply again when I'm home cause I forget the name

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Google Hit Hider by Domain (Search Filter / Block Sites)

Block unwanted sites from your Google, DuckDuckGo, Startpage.com, Bing and Yahoo search results

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1682-google-hit-hider-by-domain-search-filter-block-sites

It's actually a Tampermonkey script

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Hell yeah, this is a cool script, thank you

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I Google things like “I know you’re watching me” and “eat my ass FBI” just to keep them on notice.

fidel-cool

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

ChatGPT tends to be good for easy questions

Library genesis for a 4000 page textbook if you need more

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

LLMs are okay if you already know the answer, because they don't have a basis for truth or a bias for source; they prioritize frequency of co-occurrence of words in the training data. They can produce very convincing and completely made-up text, or propagate "common wisdom" that isn't actually correct.

Using ChatGPT is pretty much the same as trusting one of the random AI-generated blogs poisoning the search results--which other people in this thread are complaining about the uselessness of.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We’re max 5 years away from google being nothing besides llm generated content trained on llm generated content this rules

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Model collapse in 2 years or less

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

How do cranks even find their news on project bluebeam anymore when google searching "ufo" or "alien" just comes back with CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, CIA.gov, DOJ.gov, NATOpedia articles on "conspiracy theory"