My wife and I started talking about this after she had to help an old lady at the DMV figure out how to use her iPhone to scan a QR code. We’re in our early 40s.

  • Zonetrooper@lemmy.world
    47·
    1 year ago

    They don’t understand how to use a search engine effectively anymore or how to rapidly filter through large amounts of information to find answers

    This bit, at least, may be at least as much a fault of the environment - the increasing awfulness of search results these days. It used to be you could search a specific issue (e.g., “borked.exe high CPU usage” or “how to partition a drive”) and your first results would be relatively well-written sites run by actual tech people. More recently, though, it feels like:

    • The first 5-8 results are near-identical “help” sites that are 40% introduction, 40% basic troubleshooting steps, 15% “download our app!”, and 5% actually useful tips.

    • There are tech site results listed… but they’re from 2016, a different software version, maybe even a different OS.

    • "Okay, so, to fix this problem you first need… [SIGN IN TO CONTINUE READING]

    • If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll find a Reddit (or now, Lemmy) thread on the issue.

    I’d consider myself pretty technically savvy, and even I find it frustrating to search for IT info or fixes these days. The newest problem is AI-written answers cooked up for you on the spot, which are frequently completely unhelpful yet pushed to the top of the results.

    • Landrin201@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Don’t forget that those first 5-8 sites are all written by a aithat doesn’t know what it’s doing! You can tell those apart from ones written by a person because they cram as many keywords in different combinations as they can. Like, if you searched “windows 10 Firefox connection error” the first result will be:

      "How to fix Firefox Connection Error in Windows 10

      Firefox connection errors in windows 10 are annoying. Luckily, there is an easy way in windows 10 to fix Firefox conne tion errors. The Firefox connection errors in windows 10 can be caused by a few different problems. In this article we will explain how to fix Firefox connection errors in windows 10."

      It’s infuriating, because those articles inevitably are wrong about the solution, but they’re always the top results because they win the keyword battle. I use QWant for my search engine now, and while it’s WAY better than Google it still serves some of those sites up when I’m troubleshooting something because the keywords are just too strong.