Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Ashiri]

Thread

This could have been posted in the Talkin' about my generation thread and somehow I think the GenXers would have a different perspective.

 

[Clara D.]

This could have been posted in the Talkin' about my generation thread and somehow I think the GenXers would have a different perspective.

If only we existed.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

This could have been posted in the Talkin' about my generation thread and somehow I think the GenXers would have a different perspective.

Did GenXers have enough meaningful experience using the internet for schoolwork to have an opinion about this? I feel like maybe the very youngest GenXers would've been juniors or seniors by the time the internet was prolific enough for teachers to start coming up with online-research assignments.

 

[Free]

I feel like maybe the very youngest GenXers would've been juniors or seniors by the time the internet was prolific enough for teachers to start coming up with online-research assignments.

Students needed online-research assignments to start using the internet for their schoolwork?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Students needed online-research assignments to start using the internet for their schoolwork?

Well, the tweet is talking in particular about teachers expecting internet research.

 

[Noodles]

Thread

Google has been useless for at least a decade now as a search engine. Like that thread says, you used to be able to get all sorts of cool info, often user generated. Now it's all links to the same 5 sites and 1000s of sites trying to sell you shit.

Two things happened that I feel made Google absolutely worse.

One, they removed "blog search". I think maybe they just rolled it into News, but you used to be able to search and get random people's WordPress and blogger pages on a seperate search tab. Now it's just corporate "blogs" in the regular search or news tab.

Second, they stopped segmenting out shopping into the shopping tab. Now you might say, "The shopping tab still exists". The current shopping page is 100% paid placement. It used to just be regular organic search results, only just shopping, so shopping didn't clutter up the regular search (it was pushed to the shopping tab).

Another big factor, they have decided they absolutely MUST show you "millions of results" for every search. You used to be able to use a bunch of layered, I thitice operators to narrow a search down to like 10 results. But now it seems to completely ignore operators past maybe the first two results, and it very often ignores small words like "the" and "of", except if you want a particularly exacting phrase in your result, the word ordering and these small words are extremely important.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Another big factor, they have decided they absolutely MUST show you "millions of results" for every search. You used to be able to use a bunch of layered, I thitice operators to narrow a search down to like 10 results. But now it seems to completely ignore operators past maybe the first two results, and it very often ignores small words like "the" and "of", except if you want a particularly exacting phrase in your result, the word ordering and these small words are extremely important.

Yeah it seems to treat "x millions of results" as important positive marketing over the power and reach of its engine, even though that's far more results than any person could use. It's been a long long time since I've seen it, but I seem to remember once winding up with a search result only in the couple of dozens and Google complaining something like "maybe your search results were too narrow".

 

[Veritable Quandry]

They have seriously borked the advanced search.

 

[Noodles]

Also, as someone sitting basically on the edge of Gen X and Millennial, so about as "very youngest" as one can get.

By college, we were using the internet for sourcing some, though I think often books were required to be sources. I remember some papers in college where I went to the library to find books I could source that matched the other research sources I had used (from online). I did a fair number of papers and reports, but not a lot of them required a lot of sources since they were usually based on lab testing and experiments.

Wikipedia has always been a "no go" but that's easy to just cite the sources Wikipedia cites as needed, but that was also pretty much after my time of caring.

I've used computers basically all of my life, like literally since I was 5, and been online since at least the mid 90s, with dial up, which would have been some in High School, I don't really recall using the internet a lot for research though in those times. Mostly it was dialing in to some local school based message boards (one for the state and one for the state college, though I didn't ever attend that school). At some point a friend had AOL dial up. I think I was a senior or junior around the time that the "regular" internet was at all a regular part of my life. Even then, most of what I remember is using Usenet a lot and visiting a lot of anime fan websites on Geocities type pages. Not really a lot of researching for papers.

 

[danielravennest]

Google and Netflix are probably the two companies with the best reputation among the people I talk to. I don't know how long google's reputation can last if they keep going in this direction, though.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

and it very often ignores small words like "the" and "of", except if you want a particularly exacting phrase in your result, the word ordering and these small words are extremely important.

 

[Fionalein]

Back in the heydays of GenX the sheeple googled via Lycos and Yahoo! while the 1337 used Altavista or even the dreaded meta-search engines. We also had the choice between true search engines and indices...

 

[bubblesort]

Did GenXers have enough meaningful experience using the internet for schoolwork to have an opinion about this? I feel like maybe the very youngest GenXers would've been juniors or seniors by the time the internet was prolific enough for teachers to start coming up with online-research assignments.

I was born in 78, so I've been X, Y, and millennial for a little while. Remember Gen Y? It was a thing for like a hot minute, before people decided we were millennial, or X, or whatever. Then there was the i-generation fad that never caught on, either. Nobody knows where I belong. I think I saw a paper that put me in the boomer category once. IDK, I grew up on the internet a generation early, so I got the tech savvy of a millennial, but I'm also too apathetic to care what generation I'm in, because I have the gen X attitude, I guess.

I'll always remember the first time I used the internet for school. We had just gotten GEnie, because they were the first ones to offer unlimited access for a flat rate. Back then, it was all dial up bulletin board systems. We didn't have Wikipedia. We had Groilers online encyclopedia, and I loved it. Anyway, in 6th grade, they were trying to teach us how to cite sources for papers. You know, cite this book or that encyclopedia type thing. We didn't have online tools to format it, we had to actually learn the formatting for citations. So anyway, I tried citing Groilers. I came up with my own formatting, which the teacher said was very nice. Then she proceeded to tell me that I'm not allowed to cite video games, and made me redo the paper. I decided that educational institutions are run by luddites who don't want to be enlightened, so I never brought the internet up in class again, until college.

 

[Clara D.]

Back in the heydays of GenX the sheeple googled via Lycos and Yahoo! while the 1337 used Altavista or even the dreaded meta-search engines. We also had the choice between true search engines and indices...

Did anyone actually use Ask Jeeves?

 

[Noodles]

Did anyone actually use Ask Jeeves?

Not regularly. I mostly used Metacrawler. There was a Japanese search engine I used too but I don't remember the name of it.

 

[Robert Jung]

... Google and Netflix are probably the two companies with the best reputation among the people I talk to. I don't know how long google's reputation can last if they keep going in this direction, though.

I always heard the most fun company to work for was AMIGA

 

[Robert Jung]

Did anyone actually use Ask Jeeves?

I used Ask Jeeves a few times just because of the silly factor, but everyone knows Archie was BEST!

 

[Fionalein]

Did anyone actually use Ask Jeeves?

your mom

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Lots of people used Ask Jeeves, without knowing it, because it was commonly bundled as a toolbar infection in Windows installers.

Remember toolbars?

 

[Free]

Lots of people used Ask Jeeves, without knowing it, because it was commonly bundled as a toolbar infection in Windows installers.

Remember toolbars?

Do I remember them?

Uninstalling them was the number 1 way to speed up someone's computer, back before SSDs.