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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2134 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 2, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I didn't take the search engine enshittification discussion a couple months ago seriously at the time, but I think I've just been a "boil the frog slowly" victim.

I just saw a mention of Jerry Doyle online. I remembered making some comment when he died a decade ago, but a quick search couldn't find it. This time, though, I didn't just give up, because I clearly remembered making those comments - my father was in an operating room at death's door at the time, a Metafilter obituary thread was an ironic choice of topic with which to try to distract myself, and ten years later I couldn't tell you what I typed but I still remember where in the hospital waiting room I was sitting while typing.

How bad are things? Google thinks only one thread mentioning Jerry Doyle exists on Metafilter, and it wasn't the obituary thread. Gemini at first thinks an obituary thread existed, but then can't find a URL and swears it must have made a mistake. Bing seems to think nobody on Metafilter has ever talked about Jerry Doyle.

I could swear I remember DuckDuckGo being a search engine at one point, but today it just takes me to a GPT instance that is

not able to retrieve any relevant results for "jerry doyle" site:metafilter.com via my web search. If you paste a Metafilter thread URL (or the exact post title/text you saw), I can help identify which “Jerry Doyle” it refers to and summarize what it says."

This is only helpful in the sense that it's really funny for a search engine to ask me to search the web for it. Any Resemblance To Actual Future Is Purely Coincidental.

But there were winners here: Brave search (3 hits, including the one I wanted) and Kagi search (4 or 5 hits, likewise a success). It should not have felt this amazing to find web search engines in the modern era that actually index the web and then let you search it.

It's a slow accumulation of shit.

  • search engines failing to find exact quotes that I know for a fact exist online, and I'm just being lazy using a search engine to navigate to them. The text is still there, but the search engine is either hiding it, or not indexing it.
  • I get blocked searching in incognito windows (which I do by habit for tracking/profile reasons). Search engine says no. Do a captcha - the really annoying kind of captcha, like "click on 8 grainy pictures of buses". No thank you. If your browser isn't full of tracking cookies, it assumes you're a bot now.
  • minor annoyance: when opening a new tab in a private session and browsing to Google manually, it has a focus-stealing popup that means you can't just start typing. You have to click it off first.
  • a page of AI answers first - admittedly, this has gotten a lot better. It used to be comically bad, but I'd say it's now pretty good, so long as the thing you searched is mainstream enough.
  • but if I wanted a nice AI answer, I'd go to perplexity, except perplexity hits me with a login wall half the time now. No thank you.
  • been trying alternatives to get around the captcha problem, but they invariably suck. Google is still the best, even in its degraded state. Of the others I've tried, Bing is probably second best. Then Brave. Main problem I see with Bing/Brave is lack of contextual precision, and lack of updated/current results.
  • oh, and then there's the censorship. There is no substitute for yandex when you're searching for something the googs doesn't want you to see, like sports streams or TV or whatever.

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