Ho hum, does anyone have any old Fortran manuals?
Well, there's always comp.lang.fortran
Web searching died the day they invented SEO
You can find anything on the internet apart from the specific thing you're looking for. No wonder the boffins at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center are bigging up the enormity of the task of decoding data from its recently rediscovered zombie satellite. They probably did a web search for the old system and came up with a blank …
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Friday 2nd February 2018 13:39 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Re: Ho hum, does anyone have any old Fortran manuals?
I still have a Fortran manual somewhere. It is a bit battered from the fury with which I hurled it across the room every time I had to look up the abomination that is the implied do loop.
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Friday 2nd February 2018 09:57 GMT Terry 6
Yes
Doesn't matter what you search for on the internet it'll try to point you to something that makes someone some money. All the clever search tricks that we used to use to exclude useless stuff get ignored. Even more annoying though is that even when you are wanting to buy something the SEO stuff means that instead of finding answers to queries before purchase the search results only point to the aspects of the item that they want you to know about and are already well publicised. Because some marketing idiot thinks this is the USP. As in, " I don't care that the sodding printer can talk to my mobile phone, I want to know has it got an ethernet connection!"
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Friday 2nd February 2018 23:26 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Yes
"the SEO stuff means that instead of finding answers to queries before purchase the search results only point to the aspects of the item that they want you to know about "
Search term: History of Dingle Waddlers.
results.
Best prices on "History of Dingle Waddlers."
WTF? How does that work then?
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Friday 2nd February 2018 12:41 GMT DropBear
Re: Hmmmmm...
"In the post Tokyo/San Francisco earthquake world of the early 21st century, Colin Laney is referred to agents of mega-rock star Rez of the musical group Lo/Rez for a job using his peculiar talent of sifting through vast amounts of mundane data to find "nodal points" of particular relevance" - about William Gibson, Idoru
Maybe there will be, one day...
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Friday 2nd February 2018 13:14 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Re: Hmmmmm...
I used to be a whiz at finding things. There was virtually nothing I couldn't find if it was there. I was quite proud of that skill, hugely disappointed when I didn't get an interview for a job doing exactly that.
These days not so much. Even when trying to game the search with tricks which used to work it seems to just ignore them.
The worst cases I find are searching on past events when there has been some similar event recently. The recent events just drowns out the old, page after page of exactly the same copy posted by different sites.
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Friday 2nd February 2018 13:58 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Hmmmmm...
The worst cases I find are searching on past events when there has been some similar event recently. The recent events just drowns out the old, page after page of exactly the same copy posted by different sites.
I get the opposite result researching IT problems and bugs.
Lots of hits to problems in 2009 or 2011 for old versions of video drivers no longer in use or mostly retired desktops.
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Friday 2nd February 2018 18:57 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Hmmmmm...
"Apart from in the 90s when there wasn't actually much of anything to find on the WWW."
and the AOL 'web crawler' actually did a pretty good job.
Nowadays I find myself REQUIRING the quoted terms in half the searches I do in order to avoid the search on "what they thought I wanted" showing up first... damn that 'AS' (Artificial Stupidity) and thanks for "correcting" my typing/spelling for me.
(but it made an ad show up, which increased their revenue just a bit)
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Friday 2nd February 2018 10:18 GMT Fading
The B ark.....
Looks like the members of the B ark have taken over the internet - time to partition off the marketing/consumer side run by google and have another "light web" (like the dark web but this time only for enlightenment rather than access to silk road) - and it will only use IP6 and wikipedia will be useful.....
Nah... probably be just full of cat picks again....
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Friday 2nd February 2018 14:29 GMT Teiwaz
Re: The B ark.....
What's a cat pick?
Guitar pick for cats.
or
Guitar pick with cats claw pointy end.
Cats playing guitar Seriously, Wahh! cute!!
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Friday 2nd February 2018 10:48 GMT Roj Blake
The one thing SEO is good for...
...is finding SEO companies online.
SEO companies are literally the only thing where if you do a search for one you are presented with a list in the order of how good they are.
Which begs the question: why would you use one that advertises on the side of taxis?
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Friday 2nd February 2018 11:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The one thing SEO is good for...
The First Rule of SEO is to never talk about SEO especially how it works (or is supposed to work).
The Second Rule is to do everything via an anonymizer and give a very big finger to Google.
Don't forget clearing your Browser Cache and Cookies after each and every search.
VM's that get overwritten with a clean copy after every use are especially useful.
I've been doing that for the last twelve+ years and if I search for me on Google then I'm not there. Long may that remain.
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Saturday 3rd February 2018 21:36 GMT find users who cut cat tail
Re: The one thing SEO is good for...
> I search for me on Google then I'm not there
Well, that's nice you never contribute to any open source software, do not write articles or books, do not organise any public events, ... Some things can be done under pseudonyms, but for instance for scientific articles it is rather impractical.
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Sunday 4th February 2018 12:56 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: The one thing SEO is good for...
"SEO companies are literally the only thing where if you do a search for one you are presented with a list in the order of how good they are."
They never include the ones who email you to tell you how good they are, primarily because although "we are a company" but never manage to tell you their company name or domain name. Let alone the URL of your web site they're emailing to tell you they can optimise.
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Friday 2nd February 2018 11:28 GMT amanfromMars 1
And In Their Dreams ...... the Nightmare Awakes and Transforms SeeScapes
Howdy, Dabbsy,
And it has absolute nothing to do with Sub-Prime Humanity being terrified of greater intelligence being discovered and/or uncovered to be freely shared with the masses. Steer them to the gravy and leave the meat and bones untouched lest they realise they be only fed scraps to keep them dumb and subdued/comatose and susceptible to media hosted suggestions/daily presentations.
However, unfortunately for Sub-Prime Humanity, do they not Command and Control that ..... well, in some cases which be well worthy of securing with TS/SCI classification, Future Program, although they do appear to be anxious to explore and derive certain benefits from both possible and probable events with this announcement ....Geopolitical Forecasting Challenge to Improve Crowdsourced Forecasts ...... which is surely but one known Foray into Future Fields. There are bound to many others emanating from elsewhere and somewhere foreign too, with many of those wishing to remain unknown and Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.
Oh, and just in case you don't/didn't get it, it has everything to do Sub-Prime Humanity being terrified of greater intelligence being discovered and/or uncovered to be freely shared with the masses.
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Saturday 3rd February 2018 09:34 GMT amanfromMars 1
Re: And In Their Dreams ...... the Nightmare Awakes and Transforms SeeScapes
Is this one of those random text generator things? .... Alistair Dabbs
No, it is not. Does that cause a problem, Dabbsy, or do you recognise it is an ab fab fabless opportunity to exploit and expand upon?
Or would you reasonably expect a random text generator thing to say such things and deny their own existence?
In reality, they and those sort of things get everywhere searching for intelligence which is not tainted/corrupted/perverted/stunted ......
To: gfchallenge@iarpa.gov ...... 1 February 2018 6:56 PM
What do you see the Initial NEUKlearer HyperRadioProACTive IT Future to be? A Wild Wacky Western Confection or an Exotic Erotic Eastern Delight?
A Greater IntelAIgent Games Play Platform for Virtual Realisation and Global Administration of Future Other Worldly Events is Challenging DARPA to Better IT with the Sharing of Initial Master Plans here ..... http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/proof-that-adhd-is-a-fake-disease/#comment-3737442651
cc ..... 23, Ulitsa Ilyinka, 103132, Moscow, Russia.
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Friday 2nd February 2018 11:44 GMT Steve the Cynic
The article overlooks one point...
SEO is NOT about optimising how the search engines search for things I want to find.
It is about optimising how search engines find the things that want to be found, whether or not I want to find them. That explains why every time I search for name of piece of gear plus the word "review", I get two and a half pages of review integration sites that never actually have any reviews of it.
And the next three pages are full of TornadoGuard (https://xkcd.com/937/) quality reviews.
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Friday 2nd February 2018 19:04 GMT bombastic bob
Re: The article overlooks one point...
"quality" phone-app reviews in which a) there is a very small sample of 'satisfied' customers, and b) all but one are sock puppets of the phone-app author... (somewhat obvious from the xkcd comic, and thanks for that link, it's a good one)
IRL - it apparently happens a LOT, from shady sellers wanting to rip you off.
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Friday 2nd February 2018 15:16 GMT Richard 111
Tried to test this as there is nothing more annoying than finding a pintrest page full of tantalizing links that you can not quite access. Alas no pinterest links in the first page of a search for three or four food based test searches. Eventually found a term that brought up the site and the modifier works. Maybe pinterest is already dropping in the google ranks?
Putting on my tinfoil hat I was wondering if google was filtering the results based your previous searches or on your browsing history but it probably just the results being polluted by all the SEO crap.
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