Search engines had become very annoying. For example, whenever he put in a query like, “new novels 2023”, they returned lists of books.
Books and novels: not the same thing. All books are not fiction. Novels are.
Saturday’s Wandering Thought
Websites seemed to be growing worse. Almost since the inception of the web, there was clickbait, slugs, ledes, and headlines to invite surfers to click and browse. Too many of these were outright misleading, trying to sensationalize political divisions and celebrity behavior.
Grammar declines. Punctuation mistakes, yes, and typos, which can happen, but some sentences are read several times before the fact is accepted that the sentence is I&I – incomplete and incoherent.
Now, bad links are blooming. Click on a link and it takes you to the wrong place. Is hijacking back? It seems like just weak execution. Whatever it is, it’s another modern, first-world annoyance.
Don’t get him started on the pathetic search results which are often returned.
Love Those Search Engines
I decided on a whim to look up my grandfather. He passed away long ago, and I was curious about what the Internet would uncover. It’s actually because I’m killing time while KDP manipulates my files.
So I put in “Paul Seidel Pittsburgh PA” to begin.
The search results were quick: “We found Patricia Seidel.”
Who is Patricia Seidel, and why is she coming up when I’m searching for Paul?
Besides Patricia, I found Paul Seipel and Mary Seidel. They did also find Paul Seidel, but not nearly as often as Patricia Seidel. She, I thought, must be amazingly popular or mourned.
I decided that I would add “obit” to see how results changed. That made a fundamental difference; besides adding Robert Seidel to the results, John, and Jonathan, I was also presented with the latest in Pennsylvania obituaries, and Harrisburg, PA. All references to Paul Seidel were now gone, except in my query.
Other variations were tried. So were other search engines. None of it mattered; they had found the results they wanted to present. It’s too bad it didn’t match what I wanted to find. Google was best, coming up with an ad for Family Tree that had seventy-nine death records for Paul Seidel. A few of them were in Pennsylvania. Besides that on Google, though, they found Suzanne Seidel for me – just in case I really wanted to find her, I guess – and Paul Uranker. Paul Uranker was Jayne Seidel’s brother. Boy, that cleared up a lot for me. I always wondered about good ol’ Paul and Jayne, and their relationship, although I never knew her last name was the same as mine. You learn something new, you know?
Google also gave us the results for the Railway Journal for some specific date and month that mentioned St. Paul. Grandpa Paul was a good guy who drank a lot of Iron City beers, worked for Montgomery Ward, smoked packs and packs of Pall Mall cigarettes, and rooted for the Steelers and Pirates on TV, but I never heard anyone call him a saint.
“I’m hungry”
“I’m hungry”, I type, and click on the magnifying glass.
“I have found growing vegetables can help if you’re hungry.”
“If you’re hungry, the problem might be that you haven’t had anything to eat. Check to see if you’ve had something to eat recently.”
“Hungry is a country in Europe.”
“Hunger can be caused by not eating a sufficient amount of food. To fix this, you can grow food, go hunting, or go shopping. Let me know how it turns out.”
“Sign this petition to urge President Obama to end hunger in America NOW.”
“Check listings to see when The Hunger Games are playing.”
“Click here to watch The Hunger on your computer right now!”
“Many people who are hungry have found this website and its diets to be helpful.”
“Get deals on hungry at Overstocked.com.”
Those are satire answers to a simple statement to illuminate how I feel while searching for help on the net. Companies have mostly abdicated responsibility, except where they’ve realized that they can charge you to help you and pad their profits. If you do not pay for help, you’re left to the forums, and the forums give advice, like above, satirized as a response to the input, “I’m hungry.” They don’t address the issues but smather suggestions that might or not relate to your query except in the basest or broadest manner.
Looking for why I’m having Windows 7 issues that result in an ever spinning hard drive that sucks responsiveness out of the system, I’m constantly urged to look for malware, update drivers, or turn off my security software. None of them actually provide intelligent tools for why the hard drive keeps running, especially after all of those issues have already been done and eliminated. Using the computer manufacturer’s tools and windows tool, I’ve confirmed that there’s no hardware issues. And it’s depressing, because I thought, if there is a hardware problem, at least I’ll know what’s wrong. But I can’t find the cause. Don’t tell me to update because I already have.
And now I’m hungry. I can either, eat leftover kibble the cats didn’t finish, rummage through the kitchen pantry and refrigerator, or root around the front yard for bugs.
Or, like the cats, wait for someone else to take care of me and offer me a better solution.
Michael Seidel, writer 