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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

None of the search engines give good results for technical queries. Every answer you get that isn't a not-quite-right ad is either a Q&A site with a very old, narrow answer, or a "newbie friendly" tech blog whose answer is kind of wrong, but also copied from somewhere. All the newbie friendly tech blogs are copies of each other or an original that's maybe more technical but also gone or buried.

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Depends on the query I guess. My first results were:

- elixir-lang.org (the official Elixir website),

- elixirschool.com (high-quality Elixir content),

- til.hashrocket.com (also high-quality Elixir content IMO),

- hexdocs.pm (the official documentation of elixir modules/packages),

- graffino.com (relevant TIL page about the date sigil),

- a GitHub issue page about a very close sigil in Elixir.

My point was: do you think Google switches to some "high-quality" mode when it detects that you are a technical user?

No. The answers it gives for Raspberry Pi, Golang, and electronics all follow the pattern I outline above.

A few weeks ago, I tried to Google for any analysis of the shape of hot air balloons. Same pattern.

How about the ads, though? Did you see as many as usual?

As a technical user, I run Firefox with NoScript and uBlock installed. I also run DNSMasq with a large number of ad domains set to 127.0.0.1.

So I don't know. This setup isn't 100% effective against ads, but I also block Google analytics and Google tags. Now that I think about it, Google may not be able to identify me as a technical user.

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