• @Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    878 months ago

    Hate it when I search an issue and the only other person with the same problem is me 5 years ago and I didn’t figure it out then either.

  • FreshLight
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    578 months ago

    You are not the only one, trust me. Google just went to shit in the last years, so it’s harder to find what you are looking for.

    • capital
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      58 months ago

      I’m currently trying out the first 300 free searches with Kagi. It’s only been a day but it’s already looking like I’m going to subscribe.

      Remember when you got good at Google and you started to notice that you could find what you needed better than most other people? It’s a bit like that and it’s refreshing.

      • FreshLight
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        38 months ago

        How does it compare to other meta search engines that are free?

        • capital
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          28 months ago

          You’ve just made me realize I haven’t really evaluated any others.

          IIRC Startpage is one of them? I might have used that once a long while ago but I can’t say I’ve given the others a fair shake yet.

    • @dan1101@lemm.ee
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      28 months ago

      Yes that is what I thought too. Google is still good for looking up movies and games and such, but for tech stuff and shopping it has noticably declined.

    • ElTacoEsMiPastor
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      28 months ago

      thought about it, too!

      (and… not sure if it’s Jerboa, but the image appears emoji-sized to me. a bite-sized comic, hehe)

  • @tunetardis@lemmy.ca
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    488 months ago

    True story. I was looking for an answer to an obscure problem and found it in a 10-year-old stackoverflow post. Then I looked more closely at the author…

    Hey! Me from 10 years ago, stop being such a smart ass! It’s obnoxious.

    • @theherk@lemmy.world
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      118 months ago

      This happens to me more than I care to admit. I told a coworker about a Gitlab CI issue that I’d seen a few years back and hadn’t had any action. I looked up the link to share it. Me; I opened it. Brain failing me, I had forgotten it was my issue.

  • @flashgnash@lemm.ee
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    298 months ago

    I find if I’m the only one on the internet having a problem unless it’s a very specific niche application I’m probably doing something fundamentally wrong in my approach and should try figure out how other people normally do it

    • @InputZero@lemmy.ml
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      68 months ago

      Neiche application like old industrial equipment. Sure 90% of it is well documented and properly sourced. Still there’s always that one piece of equipment purchasing got because it was cheap with no documentation and just a safety placard from the 90s. Regardless it needs to be integrated and you bet your ass no one has ever searched that. Then you’re back to basics, sometimes even BASIC.

    • @Tebbie@lemmy.world
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      58 months ago

      It is usually this for me as well. I’m misunderstanding something or I completely looked over a basic thing.

  • @ooterness@lemmy.world
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    288 months ago

    Don’t worry, this just means your job is safe from being replaced by AI. No search results means no training data.

  • @smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
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    208 months ago

    Remember kids: If you find a solution to a problem nobody on Google (or your search engine of choice) seems to has, put it as a blog post on your site!

  • Maple Engineer
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    208 months ago

    My favorite is when you Google a problem and many, many people have the same problem but the company has never provided a solution.

    • @sheogorath@lemmy.world
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      108 months ago

      If your work is bleeding edge enough, even ChatGPT won’t be of help since it’s not in their training dataset.

      • @locuester@lemmy.zip
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        78 months ago

        Yeah and it won’t tell you that it hasn’t seen this pattern before. It will just make things up out of the blue which seem like they might be correct.

        Stay away from ChatGPT for bleeding edge things.

        • @livingcoder@programming.dev
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          28 months ago

          It’s still useful when it’s wrong because it can give you the jist of what should be done. If it uses a library or function that doesn’t exist, you’ll still be informed as to what it was intending for the process at that point. I’ve often gone and just replaced the made-up code with custom code that does the same thing.

    • dantheclamman
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      38 months ago

      It is nice to generate generalizable code examples, to give me clues how stuff works. I find that my work (marine biogeochemistry) is obscure enough that there’s a certain level where I am still on my own. Which is a good sign for my future employability!

  • @nodimetotie@lemmy.world
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    178 months ago

    Or the only person who phrases your issue this way) so many times I’ve found out that I just state my problem in an unusual way

    • @QuazarOmega@lemy.lol
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      48 months ago

      That’s one area where LLMs can come in handy. If you describe something, they can usually come out with what you were thinking about in another, maybe more correct way, then you search what they gave you

    • @Sombyr@lemmy.zip
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      78 months ago

      The most cathartic moment of my entire life was when I encountered that exact thing in a thread from over a decade ago expecting that to be it and lost all hope, only to find somebody replied calling them out and telling them to share their solution or future googlers were gonna be very upset. They posted their solution and it did, indeed, work.
      Don’t even remember what the issue was, but the wave of relief was amazing enough that I still remember the feeling to this day.