Any google search I do.

"how to configure arducopter gps"

9 crappy videos before they figure maybe they should link to the documentation after all.

To give them some credit, at least that search did not also come with a crappy AI summary that is broken, not applicable and wastes valuable space and bandwidth.

edit: corrected count, I missed one. And a very prominent 'see all' link before the actual one.

I searched for that exact phrase out of curiosity because I haven’t used Google in years… and it’s even worse than you say.

I got an AI summary that takes up half the screen, which doesn’t even give the right answer, then 5 YouTube videos with thumbnails and extra crud (most not even related to the question but just mention “ArduPilot” somewhere on the title), then half a page of “Other people searched for..”

Then about 3 “screens” down the page I get the ArduPilot homepage and then a bunch of embedded Reddit/Facebook discussions about ArduPilot in general, none about setting up GPS.

Google has *completely* lost the plot.

There’s a Web tab which you can click to show only the web results, none of the AI, videos, other people, etc.

I presume you want that to be the default, but I’m sure you understand that Google can’t grant your wish, because it’s subject to market forces.

For me, in Ireland, tacking "-ai" on the end of Google searches disables the hallucination engine. For now at least.

It seems to differ extremely by account or region?

I have to say AI summaries work pretty well for me on Google and my overall subjective sense is the results have been getting better the past 1-2 years.

Here's what I get for your exact search and it looks pretty reasonable?

https://postimg.cc/6y8p3XH7

My search results were the opposite: 1. an AI summary 2. a link to the documentation 3. 4 videos that seem legit 4. a bunch more web links

So you're not talking about AI generated videos but just regular videos by hobbyists that you think are crap?

I knew you'd come back with a comment like this one. You never argue in good faith. No, I wasn't talking about AI generated videos because then I would have written a different comment. Bye now.

I searched for this phrase in chrome, first with quotes, and next without.

The very first response I got with quotes was this HN post.

The very first response I got without quotes took me to the docs here: https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-positioning-landing...

I sometimes wonder how much other browsers, countries, or languages play into the search results for a particular user.

Every time I read someone complaining about Google search results, I try to use another search engine for awhile, just to see if I'm missing something. Every time I do this, the alternatives are awful and I shake my head and go back to Google search.

That's interesting. NL, Firefox.

EN/US, Chrome, Linux Flatpak

There are ppl that depend on me for tech support. What search engine should I install on their phones?

duckduckgo: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+configure+arducopter+g...

Optionally with a custom CSS rule to block the starting video block: [data-layout="videos"]

Regular DDG doesn't seem much better than Google: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+configure+arducopter+gps

AI summary and videos dominating it.

AI summaries are actually rather good, in the general case. I know they take away traffic from source sites, but they work well for search users.

Videos, on the other hand, are a cancer.

> AI summaries are actually rather good, in the general case.

The google ones for me seem to be talking about something unrelated to what I'm looking for a significant percent of the time because it interprets it as a much more popular concept that looks like my query if you squint very hard. Other times it pulls up seo-spam tier answers that are plainly wrong.

The best free and mainstream option would be duckduckgo at the moment in my opinion.