this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

People don't bookmark? I have dozens of bookmarks all set up in folders. It's just easier than typing every time. Plus, I have a PC connected to my TV for watching illegal sports streams. With bookmarks, I don't need my keyboard most of the time. I just have a wireless mouse and that's it.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

you are way more right than you think. Now that i think about it i started bookmarking more and more in correlation with the search engine enshittification trend.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I know people that just keep all of their tabs and never close them rather than bookmark. Its insane to me, I don't get it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (8 children)

bring back del.icio.us cowards

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (3 children)

DDG seems to still function nicely. And I've never stopped using bookmarks. Didn't know people weren't using bookmarks anymore... I mean, what do you? Search for the same website you frequently use or just make a button that can do it in one click?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

From my personal experience it became worse in the past few years. Sometimes I couldn't find something only to find it with one search request in google or yandex /:

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (3 children)

DDG is complete dogshit. It's my primary search engine and it drives me mad with how useless it is. It was pretty bad but it's gotten way way worse over the past couple of months I feel.

And yeah until a couple of days ago I hadn't bookmarked anything for 13 years. I just keep tabs open, remember names of sites or search the web. But I think I'll start bookmarking again in some cases, but bookmarks suck ever since Delicious disappeared.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Ddg is great for the US, but shit outside.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So I'm not really crazy right? Google has been going downhill over the past year or so?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I already bookmarked but with this whole enshitification I began hoarding data. All those txts, images, videos, songs that I bookmarked? Am downloading and categorizing all of it

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

The keywords for bookmarks in Firefox are amazing. I type the thing my brain thinks of when I think of a website and boom I'm there.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

I've never let go of bookmarks and RSS. Still the best systems around.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Offline AI is a better search engine now. Even at 20% fake or made up references, it is better than a search engine.

The reverse is likely true. Search engines suck because they are actively trying to edge out the AI competition as the products that will emerge from AI will soon make search engines unprofitable for peripheral data mining through stalking people.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

I never use bookmarks. Not because of search engines but because of browser history.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Bring back personal homepages and webrings!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

https://www.anarchymeanything.com/

The old internet done for a laugh

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

And visitor counters

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Neocities is the successor! It's pretty cool

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (3 children)

The only reason I don't bookmark much, is because I'm actively hoarding 517 tabs.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 8 months ago (5 children)

I always bookmark sites I know I will use frequently. I didn't realize people didn't do that anymore lol

What happened to the search engines? They always seem to work fine for me

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Most people don't know advanced googling anymore, even though it largely still works.

As far as people not using bookmarks, they just refuse to close tabs until they're sure they'll never return to a given site. People even obsess over tree style tabs and other tab organizing add-ons or features rather than, y'know, using bookmarks with folders which can already handle all of that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

What do you consider advanced googling?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

“Advanced” Site:google.com filetype:pdf -“consider” etc etc.

Using targeted operators to refine your search.

Plenty of resources on it by searching “Google operators”

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh wow, they made it easier and people still didn’t use it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That's been there for decades. We were taught to use it in middle school (~2003 for me). There used to be a fairly prominent link to the advanced search page from the main Google homepage.

For a while, regular google searches were good enough to find everything you needed, so the skill became less common/important. My guess is that public knowledge of it has just atrophied over time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

AI happened. Beyond the immediate issue of decabytes of garbage articles that now show up any time you search something, information on the internet has now crossed the line to "inherently untrustworthy" because anything could be AI generated. If you're not able to confirm that a real human being wrote the information you're looking at, you just have to assume it's wrong.

The internet was definitely a sketchy place in the past, but there were at least a few places you could go to get reliable information. Those places either don't exist anymore, have become buried in the avalanche of AI garbage, or have become AI garbage themselves. Bookmarking a place when you do find it, like OP is suggesting, doesn't sound like such a bad idea now.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

My problem is that when I search for something, I often want to find precisely the text that I'm searching for. Not just some of the words, not synonyms, and not random stuff with no apparent connection to it. Putting the search query in quotes doesn't always help.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

It's been years since I felt any satisfaction using a search engine, personally. Between the ocean of sponsored results and the ever-growing mountain of AI-generated Search Engine Optimisation-filled garbage it's so much harder to find stuff than a decade ago.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I mostly get sponsored sites or content farms that repeat the same text about things as other context farms, but no answers to what I'm actually looking for. Or I want to know about something that happened a while ago, but it only gives me results for the most recent version of the thing despite including details that should limit it to the prior one.

My search criteria is the same as I used 10 years ago when I actually got helpful results.

Search engine optimization has ruined search engines.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

For much of the internet, optimization used to mean improving usefulness and usability for end users. Now that we (as a society as well as individually) can't go without the internet anymore, optimization means improving usefulness for shareholders and/or advertisers, to the detriment of the user. This doesn't matter to them anymore though, since giving up on search engines, social media etc just isn't an option for users anymore.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Sounds like someone has been searching YouTube on google every time they wanted to watch YT

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I never stopped bookmarking. Type a word and usually the browser will find that long lost page from the bookmarks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Don't even have to bookmark. You type few words separated by spaces of anything in browser history, browser will show it as a suggestion. Example: "steam palworld" "Jira projectname board" Etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

You don't clear your browsing history regularly?

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