This video is posted as Adam Savage's "rant on laser printers" but it's really about how dreadful Google's search engine is nowadays. He hopped online to research his way to a nice new "large format laser printer" and found the site useless: the results are a mix of ads, low-quality referral roundups ("click to see price!") and incoherent nonsense he suspects is procedurally generated. All the early non-ad results are content-light lists of inkjet plotters, some with intentionally misleading SEO-goosing headlines.
"The signal-to-noise ratio has surpassed 1," Savage said, savagely. "… I thought I was going crazy"
As always, he could get better results by adding a magic word to the search query (in this case "reddit" vastly improves the results). But what a dismal outcome.
(He also admits he didn't try Bing, but he need not bother, as it's even worse, scraping the content from the same SEO lists and dumping it into the results as plain text.)
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