It was only after I appended "Ian M Banks" that I got the result I was looking for. I'm honestly surprised Google failed that search so hard.
It's the digital equivalent of going to a restaurant and looking for vegetarian food only to be inundated with gluten-free and other health-fad foods.
I suspect their algorithm is in a bit of a doom loop as it's being trained on people clicking worse and worse results of pages that seem clearly written to game the SEO.
This is not unique to google. Amazon keeps including things I didn't search for because they want to be "helpful".
Indeed, my experience at big box hardware stores is matching this as well. If you go for one simple thing that you know you want, you're presented with an entire aisle of absolute crap that sort of does it but for much more money while the one item you need is out of stock.
Nobody seems to care that the ads are worthless and make nobody any money.
I don't want to argue with your overall point at all, because I assume that whatever this sentence specifically means to you is true for you - but given that there is no actually objective definition of what a healthy diet is - it's hard to agree with the statement in general. I would feel like I was eating unhealthily if I had a can of coke every day, but that doesn't actually mean it's unhealthy. It probably depends on everything else I'm eating, how much I'm burning off, maybe even something as fine-grained as how fast I drink it. You would almost definitely feel unhealthy if you were eating bread every day, but as long as it was whole-wheat and had some good sandwich fixins in it, I'd feel pretty good about that.
Anyway, sorry if I'm being pedantic, but I feel like people toss around things like "healthy diet" as if we're all supposed to know and agree what that means.
Eating bread every day is actually pretty common in some cultures and people don't even stop to think it's unhealthy because it's so commonplace, so even that varies.
Most of the "health fad" people you're talking about would probably self-categorize themselves as NCGS, but that doesn't mean that everybody who is NCGS is part of a health fad. Double-blind "challenge" studies where people are unaware if what they are eating contains wheat/gluten have confirmed that for some people this is definitely real and not a made up fad.
I'm not denying the existence of people going gluten free for fad or orthorexia reasons, but be careful when you lump everyone who is gluten free for non-celiac reasons into that category.
(I have a sibling with celiac disease).
I've noticed things that never had glueten in it, labeled "glueten-free" after the craze a few years ago.
>With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need
When you Google that in quotes you get actual results from Google Books and Goodreads, while Bing/DuckDuckGo only returns an archive from a random blog that quotes it halfway down the page, and the new hot search engine Brave finds nothing. I agree it's a little disappointing that one mistaken word throws Google so far off the trail.
>There were (true) stories of people falling off cliffs and the terminal relaying their scream in time for a Hub unit to switch to that terminal's camera, realise what was happening and displace a drone to catch the faller in mid-air; there were other stories about terminals recording the severing of their owner's head from their body in an accident, and summoning a medical drone in time to save the brain, leaving the de-bodied person with no more a problem than finding ways to pass the months it took to grow a new body.
>A terminal was safety.
>So Gurgeh took his on the longer walks.
Our cell phones might sometimes be pretty useful devices, but they're not quite capable of that sort of thing yet.
Still, you can walk around and explore without using it, while still having it along in a pocket just in case you do the modern equivalent of fall off a cliff or get decapitated. Just better hope you have cell service and your battery is charged up if you do.
I got a smartphone 10 years ago after a trip where I got lost in an unfamiliar city at night. I did manage to navigate my way around by sense of direction and spotting buildings and river, and was just a little late to the party I was going to. But I thought something with maps would be more useful than a flip-phone if I ever got lost while traveling again.
A few years later, exploring randomly in the mountains a couple of states away with my wife, we pulled into a small town late one evening and got out our phones to look for a place to eat and a place to stay. No service, for either of us. So we just wandered around the town with our eyes open and asked people. Found a great restaurant and a nice quiet little bed and breakfast. Once again serendipity beat the cell phone.
What is more concerning is that kids who've grown up with them their entire lives just might not be able to handle that sort of thing. They might just freak out as much as if they had fallen off a cliff or something.
But can you imagine the aggravation if Google chooses to do the opposite and 'helpfully' 'corrects' your quotes for you? Actually I am not sure I have to imagine...
"Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal"
I get the exact answer as a snippet at the top of the search. I am beginning to think everyone that has bad search results has some kind of malware installed on their computer since their searches always work for me.
I'm starting to think that standards are simply rising over time. 10 years ago, would anyone complain that an incorrect quote from a 30-year-old book didn't return results?
Without a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know
It suggests results that don't include terminal (but of course that is a critical word for this quote), selecting must include terminal, gives the quote as the top results.
And since our written observations modify the behavior, an update: quoting the whole sentence now returns a single result - this page.