For my FBI agents, I always add “linux” or the programming language name to the start. Except for “Go”, which I still search as “golang”.
As an aside, fuck everyone that names things without thinking about the search results. “R” is especially terrible. “Go” is saved by “golang”. “Python” with programming. “R” is not saved by anything.
Google’s become shitty enough that it barely matters. “We didn’t find many results for the thing you typed, so here’s something else.”
I’ve googled exact phrases I know took me to the results I was looking for just a few years ago and gotten exactly nothing.
It’s just so sad to see the business majors win yet another front in their war against humanity. At least Google Scholar still works. For now.
Is it actually Google, or the vile SEO scum or both?
Vile SEO scum aren’t why “open watcom” returns “did you mean: wacom tablets?”
Yes, you’re right - I forgot about all the fuzzy logic they’ve incorporated!
Fuzzy is not the first f-word I’d choose.
Moldy?
Same.
And C really should have predicted this problem :P
Rlang
We were laughing at work because we use Psalm for PHP static analysis and one of the guys was getting bible quotes in the Google results
how to automatically kill orphans.
i actually have a script that kills all unattached tmux sessions, named
kill-orphans, because its funny (even if the name may be technically wrong idk)I prefer funny over accurate.
you must wait for your children or you will accumulate zombies.
surprisingly good parenting advice from the art of unix programming.
Googling and binging programming stuff really shows how much the instant answers, AI stuff and other “optimizatioms” have degraded search results. Every time I have to skip all that bullshit on the top to the actual results. Often, I even have to switch on verbatim mode. And even then it says “There don’t appear to be a lot of good results…” or whatever, but the good result is right there, after I had to dance around all their hoops.
The search giants just don’t understand that often there is just one good source for an information and it doesn’t get repeated all the time, because it perfectly explains it, is brand new or just not something the kids on youtube or reddit would enjoy. They think people want to find things the web is plastered with. So weird.
Yeah. This is why I just search ‘x documentation’ and just go from there
The other day I was reading an highlighted result at the top of the page.
The highlight was something like “Use this.”
But reading the full text the meaning was totally different, it was sort of… If you don’t mind not having [thing I was searching] use this.
It’s almost always the same feeling with anything AI related for me.
How to bash cat with pipe? It doesn’t make sense
The second one doesn’t either.
When you Google a technical thing you could use the whole sentence like “in a bash session how would you pipe the output from cat to something else?” But that is long winded and can be constraining for the search engine so you boil it down to just the essential words". Start with “how to” then add “bash Cat pipe”, and insert “with” because that is the desired adjective.
I’ve just woken up and I’m wondering if I missed an implied /s. Anyway.
OK but if you already know to use a pipe why would you search that?
Yes, but it’s funny. A better search would be “how to pipe cat output in bash”
Here is an excerpt of the table of contents for the book “Linux Application Development”:
- Process Primitives
- Having Children
- Watching Your Children Die
- Running New Programs
- A Bit of History: vfork()
- Killing Yourself
- Killing Others
- Dumping Core
- Simple Children
- Running and Waiting with system()
- Reading or Writing from a Process
It’s actually quite a good book.
- Process Primitives
Parse error at comma splice.
And you haven’t even mentioned Master and Slave
not Cable Select
“Leaders and Followers”
Similar for looking up how to play Crusader Kings.
