Search Seems Dead To Me
I have too look something up, I'm dreading all of the crap ...
Rant Warning!
So just to warn you that this post is simply a rant. If you don't want to read anything negative, or if you simply don't want to hear me bitching about the state of the internet then you can probably move to a different page, and just ignore this one.
Remembering the Good ol' Days
Sit back children (says the middle aged gen-x) and let me tell you about the beginning of search engines on the internet. Ok no forget that it would take too long and there are enough articles about all the different internet search engines in the past. Were they perfect? No, but usually you could find what you were looking for. Of course the internet was a bit smaller back in the early 2000's when I was first actively online. So the engines had less crap to wade through, to provide you good results. So my complaints are not 100% about the state of search engines, but also of the crap people post and trying to find that gem in the giant pile of shite.
I do remember being able to find most sites using the 'keywords' attribute in 'meta' tags. They allowed the old search engines to help organize the websites so you just needed to include them in your search request, and would ultimately find what you were looking for. However, then it seems that the search engines started more or less ignoring either my request for keywords, or the keywords for websites themselves. I don't know why things changed, but they did and now trying to find the information you need is difficult.
Hey BIG TECH! Remove AI From Search!
AI hallucinations are absolutely not helpful when you are looking for information. I know you tech bros and big tech in general get serious sexual arousal from stuffing AI everywhere, but I can tell you right now that like most things it should only be used in moderation. I do not want nor do I need a summary of my search, I simply need a list of sites that match keywords in my search request, preferrably ordered so that the newest ones are at the top. I can't count the number of times I look for information online and fine within the first 5 links, one that is from 10 years ago. I'm pretty sure software in general has changed a lot since 2016. Please, how hard would it be to simplify search back to the old days?
Problem not only Search Engines. Authors Update Your Shite Site!
Part of the problem is, as I previously mentioned, there are a lot more sites on the internet. Some of these sites are 'expert' sites with tutorials and information that people like to search for to find information. For example I'm currently looking for information on how to configure a base path for rest apis while working with SpringMVC. There are of course there are plenty of sites that provide information, but as I'm looking at the code they provide and comparing it to the version of the Spring Framework that I'm using, I realize that the methods they use have been deprecated in my version. That I find so very annoying. Yet their site was at the top of my search results (I'm using DuckDuckGo at this point, which yes I know it is simply sanitized Bing, but at least it actually gives me results instead of AI hallucinations like Google). The problem? They haven't updated their information, or maybe they wrote a new article, but haven't add a link. There is a date posted showing it was written in November 2025, but I can't be certain that the search engines take that date into account. Is there even a mechanism for websites to let the search engines know that their article is out of date? Who knows, all I know is I spent time reviewing their article and the code snippets, only to find that if I were to implement it I would likely have to fix it in 6 months because the methods would all disappear. Of course if the Spring developers would simply, provide the replacement methods in the JavaDoc, that would make things easier; however that is a rant for a different post. Honestly, if you are posting code online, in your blog, then please provide information such as what framework and which version, not just "here's how to do this in Spring!". Besides labelling what version you are working with, if there are changes then please update your post to include the changes. You don't have to rewrite it, but ensure that your readers see that there has been a change to the framework, even if you don't know how to do the same thing with the new methods, keep your readers informed. Otherwise your site is just click bait and not useful at all.
I'm feeling better now
Thanks for letting me get that out of my system. Sometimes you just need to post a good rant and blow off some steam. If I ever find the link to a self-hosted internet search server, it's going to be added to my home server. I'll just have to beg my wife for the money to buy larger NAS drives.