no, the thread is labeled accurately, you just missed the point entirely. The thread title did not imply that that search engine itself was making things harder to find. All a search engine does is produce the results of a query. It is assumed that the user themselves are writing the query into the search box and scrutinizing the result. That is obvious and why you would even suggest it as if we forgot it comes off as overly patronizing. Moving on: That bit, the scrutinizing the result bit for the factual info that you are looking for, that is what is getting harder. You can type anything into google and get a result. This thread is about finding a useful result and if doing so has gotten harder.

I have much more to say, however I do not believe this thread is an appropriate place for my "Human Regression" rant.

Ah, Mr.Alex. You hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what I was going for. The search engines are producing more results that better match the query but the quality of those results are absolute garbage because people do not write or post quality content anymore. Thank you for your input!

OK thats a fact So what is useful to you?. It rough trying to find stuff in a hay stack.

Aside from the copypasta blogs I mentioned before, the trend with GNU/Linux forums in general is away from learning and users administering their own systems and towards users asking countless repeat questions and expecting others to spoon feed answers and provide commands for them to copy, paste and enter blindly. People are being told that it's ok to not use the terminal and it's ok to expect it to "just work" with 0 effort on their part. That may be true in a sense, but someone with those requirements should use a more suitable OS or pay someone else for support.

You're welcome.

Also gotta mention that people are losing ability to think and communicate rapidly. There are several big "questions & answers" projects out there in WWW and 5–7 years ago people asked questions and others actually answered them. I used to communicate a lot through those Web-portals. And these days, just after several years from this idea took off, people on there don't answer. They rather jive and joke around, not taking any question seriously. The more far it goes, the worse it becomes. And if you ask them not to joke around and answer the actual question you asked, no answer follows. They just don't know, don't have anything to say on the matter. They used to. Not anymore. The problem is in people. I try to imagine WWW 10 years from now and as I see it, it's not the place I will want to visit anymore.

As for Google, their "search" is utterly useless without customization for non-english speaking people.
Being from Belgium, my default languages are both Dutch and French. However, when I search for something, I prefer English (being more universal).

While I appreciate their efforts in localization, it's not working.
So ... yes. Searching the web did become harder (and not just because of spam/dupe/mallware sites).

https://duckduckgo.com/ is my most used search portal, but still not as good as Google used to be (2 years ago).

It sounds like some folks here might appreciate http://www.factbites.com/

I used to have a perl script called "research" which did something similar to factbites, but then Google changed their output format which made "research" unable to function, and I never got around to fixing it. Factbites does a much better job, though, so I'm just going to use that.

I too run into those parrot sites often. I seem to notice them more when it comes to bug reports.

Lol, I was about to fire of a similar poll, asking how strong your google-fu was. But wisely I did a search first on the forums, so luckily now I wont look like a complete noob.

The reason for my own question was that someone asked a how-to question that, when translated to agoogle query gave the answer in the first hit.

Which leaves me wondering if: I'm that good ,
people really are too damned lazy, (man when I was a kid I had to jump on my bike and drive 1.5 mile to the nearest library to get an answer. ) or
it's indeed to difficult to find relevant information.

My conclusion is that the information is there an not to hard to find, if people just would take their time about what they need and how to phrase it.
But in a time of instant gratification it's always about now, Now, NOW.

Which reminds me of the cartoon refferenced here .

Cheers

If possible, I will use a forum specific to my needs to search, but for general/life info, I will search by the 'big player', knowing that the results will be skewed by advertisers & those that pay to have their sites come up first. Somebody has to pay the costs for storing this info, that's just a fact of life.

Since i got on the internet in 96 good information is increasingly harder to find, especially over the last decade or so. Search engines rank commercial importance over everything else.
If you are looking for something technical and linux related, its much more a babble of idiots than it was even a few years ago. Blame ubuntu.