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Comment by dfajgljsldkjag | Hacker News Reader

Companies doing SEO for lead generation have been ruining search results for years now. I've searched for basic car questions so many times and gotten low effort articles from some random dealership in Kentucky or Ohio [1]. No, Toyota of Louisville, I am not a lead and I don't want your opinion any more than I want the opinion of any of the other 9000 local car dealerships in the country. And this pattern applies to home maintenance[2], legal questions, etc. Screw those guys.

We don't click because those guys have made it so there's nothing worth clicking on.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+often+to+do+oil+change

(this particular search has a few high quality results ranked at the top, but it illustrates what random dealerships from who knows where are doing to ruin the results.)

2. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+wash+upstairs+windows

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I’ve found wading through SEO spam is one of the best use cases for AI.

Perplexity, Google, Brave, and DDG have really good AI search results.

Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.

I remember asking, “Can I park overnight on the street in ${county} without getting a ticket?” And instead of having to fish through government websites, AI just spit out the right answer and the links it used. Similar for “what temp should I cook chicken to?”

It’s only a matter of time until everyone figures out how to SEO spam AI, but until then, I’m a big fan.

> Now you can not only ask, “how often do I do an oil change?” you can ask, “I have a 2022 Honda Pilot coming up on 30k miles. What services should I have done? This car has been sitting for the last 6 months because I’ve been overseas” and you get a custom search response tailored to what you want.

Search operators had already solved this problem before Google decided to start ignoring them. When I genuinely came up with nothing it was usually because I didn’t have the vocabulary to make the search in the first place; this is where LLMs really shine. I often resolve technical issues by just asking the LLM what to do and responding “Didn’t work,” until I get something more helpful. It feels like smacking the top of a TV to get better reception, and it doesn’t always work, but it works often enough that I find myself using my LLM of choice quite a bit more, and Google quite a bit less.

> smacking the top of a TV to get better reception

Ha! this is such a funny analogy.

I wonder if we should make littering a offense in the internet instead.

Nah seriously, how much longer can we afford to waste the energy of the planet and of humanity on such bullshit?

AI browsers are great for defeating dark patterns too. I can go into ChatGPT Atlas and tell it to cancel my Adobe subscription and it'll eventually figure it out despite all their attempts to make it difficult. Love that.

ChatGPT/Perplexity don't make an AI browser for Linux :'( so I'm stuck with BrowserOS for now. I'll have to spend more time with it to get to know what it can do.

You're not wrong, but sometimes a local <seller of thing> will do SEO by actually putting up valuable articles. (e.g. the Yale Appliance blog)

And for a kinda counter-example for the car dealership one, Ford dealerships sell extended warranties that are backed by Ford and usable at any Ford dealership. If you're in the market for one of those, you absolutely want to go with whichever dealership offers you the lowest price in North America, and not whatever your local dealership is charging.

I had this experience when I searched for Jerusalem bugs. The page mentioned flu-like symptoms when bitten.

Then I realized it was a pest-control website. If you now Google "jerusalem bug fever" the AI talks about flu-like symptoms. Its source? That pest control website...

In the case of 1, the usual mantra "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer" surely applies?

There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.

While I don't know much about cleaning windows, providing more specific context for example 2 will likely do wonders to the quality of result returned too.

It's not a worthless question at all. The answer is "read the manual" and maybe also "your usage might meet the severe maintenance schedule and you'll need to read the footnotes."

Yes, it's not a question that has a literal numerical answer in the exact form that's being asked for, but if you ask an actual human they can 100% answer it for you.

Ask a mechanic friend how often to do an oil change and they will 9 times out of 10 give you an answer without asking what model of car.

I can’t say I’m in the business of asking 10 or more friends to confirm this, but any number they provide without knowing the car is a guess at best, and likely erroring on side of caution. A Google search with the car model in the query virtually always returns the correct figure ranges for said car.

Ah but see the most important piece of information is not what the manufacturer specifies. Most mechanic friends would tell you manufacturers are over-extending the interval to make their cars look good to purchasers and because they only care about getting to the warranty end not total life of the car. While 3k miles old wisdom is out dated, if you do your own oil changes you can see a massive change in what comes out after 5k miles.

By over specifying the question you will miss out on the more important context.

Much of what you say is true, but again your mechanic friend can only provide a meaningful answer if they know the model of car. It’s the first question any half way competent mechanic will ask!

The cars sitting outside my home vary in oil service interval by over 10k miles, as just one simple example, and I don’t drive anything particularly exotic.

By under-specifying the question, you rob it of the context to be answered accurately.

>There's "nothing worth clicking on" for question 1 because it's arguably (certainly so in my opinion) a worthless question. Without at the very least providing the specific model of car, even an experienced mechanic will struggle to answer it for you meaningfully as phrased - there are a huge range of recommended oil service intervals across different car models.

Doesn't seem too hard to generate a bunch of content marketing articles for "how often to change oil for {2012,2013,...2026} corolla", similar to how there's content marketing spam for every windows error message imaginable, which end up being some variant of "have you tried sfc /scannow?".

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