Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers
www.theverge.com
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.

  • frankgrimeszz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4284·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • Pechente@feddit.deEnglish
      1091·
      6 months ago

      My DuckDuckGo experience has surprisingly been more useful.

      Yeah, right!? I remember that one or two years ago DDG was consistently worse than Google but recently Google’s quality has dropped off a cliff. Now when I don’t get the desired result in DDG and switch to Google, the results are usually just as bad or worse.

      • smort@lemmy.worldEnglish
        27·
        6 months ago

        The only time google gets me better results than DDG now is if I have a really vague question, like “movie where the guy wears a trash bag on his leg and has a piña colada on the train to Milwaukee”

          • ignism@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            6 months ago

            Could you elaborate? You’re saying you’re going to google for programming issues, but at the same time devs don’t do SEO?

            • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              7·
              6 months ago

              Sure. What I mean is that when I search for issues in duck duck go, I don’t see relevant results. But then I put “!g” and what I want (usually stack overflow or GitHub) comes to the top.

              So it makes sense that programming sites do tags and keywords properly to optimize things for the user instead of trying promote their site no matter what.

              At least that’s my guess anyway.

              • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                4·
                6 months ago

                Stack overflow has been one of the consistently reliable googleable sites for decades.

                It’s a shame Quora has strayed so far from their initial cloning of SO’s site. It seems to be turning into AskYahoo 2 fast from the results I’ve seen lately.

      • Opisek@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Yup. I constantly found myself appending !g for important queries that I needed an answer for right then and now. Google has stopped providing that commodity. It’s almost never worth it anymore to fall back to Google.

    • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.onlineEnglish
      6214·
      6 months ago

      My DDG searches have been absolute garbage for the past few months. About 75% of the time I have to re-search my keywords on Google to actually get a relevant result.

      It’s bad enough that I’m about to switch back to Google.

      • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
        44·
        6 months ago

        That’s not been my experience. I’ve been using DDG for years, and when I first switched I would occasionally have to go find something on Google instead. That slowly fell off as the years went by because going to Google and getting better search results became rarer and rarer. It’s to the point now where I don’t even do it, unless I need to look at something on street view.

        • makyo@lemmy.worldEnglish
          23·
          6 months ago

          I second this, this has been my experience exactly. It’s gotten so bad that not only do I not need the Google fallback, but I’m starting to feel like the DDG results are better than the Google ones in the first place.

          • Opisek@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            Better than Google now, but still not better than Google back then. It my experience at least.

      • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        It depends on what your searching. For me programming questions are way better on google.

        Also searching obvious questions like a country’s population, google still does its job there too.

        • frankgrimeszz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          6 months ago

          I used to like it, but there was one incident where it fed me links to phishing sites. Like all the results were malicious. I suspect they had an internal breach or the session was somehow hijacked. That was years ago, but it made me wary. It’s usually okay.

        • 24_at_the_withers@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Funny. I primarily used Startpage for the last few years, but have had increasing problems with them providing bad/irrelevant results and frequently straight-up blocking my IP or requiring completion of a CAPTCHA before providing results. I switched to DDG, which has been working pretty well, and seems much better to me than it had when trying it a few years ago.

      • Squizzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        I deleted their app and moved search engines, they got shit quick. So bad at their main usp. I was constantly fed hyper local results, local even with location off. And dont get me started on how bad it was for porn.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
      211·
      6 months ago

      If I’m looking up something general, like some actor or tv show, then DDG is perfect. If im troubleshooting some weird software issue then i find it doesnt always list as many results, as if it hasnt indexed as many sites.

      DDG at least now means I can search random shit without it suddenly being inserted into my social media algorithms like some kind of psychological torture.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      201·
      6 months ago

      Oh my god the Fandom wiki for minecraft uses the same little tab icon as the actual minecraft wiki but it has a fucking “are you an adult or child” popup EVERY SINGLE TIME a page loads

      I hate it so much

    • rickyrigatoni@lemm.eeEnglish
      17·
      6 months ago

      Use breezewiki extension. Redirects fandom articles to a frontend that removes their bullshit and replaces fandom with independant wikis when possible.

    • sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      If you have any tips or tricks for DDG please do share! I’m definitely getting better overall results there, but the local ones can still be a bit rough.

      • RunawayFixer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        I found that Qwant gives decent results in my native non English language, results similar in quality to Google, but way better than DDG which often just gives English results.

    • rf_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      6 months ago

      What are better alternatives to fandom? I see the incumbents name get repeated more often than the alternative unfortunately.

      • sensiblepuffin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        6 months ago

        The problem is that fandom tends to vacuum up and supersede the smaller wikis, and the SEO bullshit just makes it happen even faster. The answer to your question unfortunately is “it depends on the game/show/fandom”.