Google suggest vi for Emacs and Emacs for vi

6 years ago (google.com)

Do a Barrel Roll

https://www.google.com/search?q=do+a+barrel+roll

That's hilarious ! Reminds me of the « french military victories » query that suggested « french military defeats » (which, as a Frenchman myself, pissed me off in a funny way :p)

  • It's also funny how the way you recount the story is the way most people remember it. It is, in fact, not what happened!

    What really happened was that someone created a web page that resembled the Google results – and included that suggestion. They managed to get that page to become the number one hit for the search term "french military victories". The idea was then that if someone hit "I'm feeling lucky", it would seem like Google suggested "french military defeats".

    The page is still up, although the Google-like appearance is no longer very up to date: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/victories.html

    • > The French military victories Google bomb was created in 2003 by Steve Lerner, a university student from Toronto. Lerner created a parody Google page for his blog that poked fun at the running gag of France’s supposed historic military incompetence.

      3 replies →

The Google organization is clearly sensitive to the role of online services play in promoting divisiveness, and doing something about it.

I liked how if you go to vi the page has the following:

Did you mean emacs

A top ad placement for VI(trademarked) Vodafone and Idea which are now trademarked together! So exciting.

A top stories link - Vi (Vodafone) launches Rs 948 family postpaid plan with unlimited benefits: Check details The Indian Express·14 hours ago View all

Which is really great that I can keep up on all the news about Vodafone.

questions people ask about Vi, half of which are about editor and other half not.

at 100% zoom on my mac air I get half of the questions interestingly enough before I have to scroll down.

Wikipedia page about the editor

So I have to scroll down to see the first relevant hit, now of course it makes total sense that vi has other hits, also because in Danish it means we, but the dumb joke on the top makes it sort of silly, especially if I just followed from emacs to vi, because in that case I would think - huh, a vote for ranking results for text editor +10.

Maybe I'm just easily irritated right now.

  • > Wikipedia page about the editor

    > So I have to scroll down to see the first relevant hit

    FWIW this is the top result on DuckDuckGo and Searx, and on the latter most of the first screenful of results are about the editor (all if you count https://vi-editor.com/). Interestingly the first screenful of searx results all come from DDG (the next has many from reddit), but the pages are definitely different.

    Edit: and on Startpage! So apparently your results may just be the result of Google trying to create a personalized filter bubble for you.

  • This definitely has something to do with your (or my!) search bubble because the top link for `vi` for me is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi, followed by "Basic vi Commands - Colorado State University" and "How to Use the vi Editor - University of Washington" (vim.org is the 4th link)

  • In US, behind a pi-hole, all results on the first page except one are directly vi-related. Not sure if this might have something to do with the fact that I've been searching spacemacs keybindings nonstop in the past 2 weeks.

  • I don't normally use Google.

    I search for 'vi' and all of my links are about the editor.

    You experience is clearly customized for you.

    This is why I don't normally use Google.

    • why is it whenever google customizes something for me they do such a bad job at it! what's wrong with me! /teary teen voice

"Did you mean: vi"

That sounds like a "passive aggressive" post from /g/ haha!

There's also this https://twitter.com/xkcd/status/1333622758052388864/photo/1

Someone from google said search is just a kind of AI. I think some other people like to say AI is just a random number generator that's good at convincing people there's some intelligence.

  • There's something AI-like going on, it just happens to be significantly dumber than the old thing:

    My "favorite" type of search problem is when I as a developer search for Angular mat-table and it shows me tables with mattresses on: Clearly something is going on in there but it is dumber than most dogs and to make matters worse - less obedient too (For 10 years Google couldn't get itself to accept when I asked for verbatim results, they just had to insert some absolutely irrelevant pages into the the top 10 results every time to waste my time. Now I have changed my defaults, DDG fails just as badly on this, but trying in Google is faster from DDG than the other way around and also it feels good.)

I guess this is manually set by some employee, but I wonder if such links might have been also created automatically for some topics.

When I type "string", it returns commercials for g-string models. I love it because it makes me realize I'm living in in a small bubble.

  • Try working with a library that prefixes all of its class definitions with T and defines its own string class. That was the day that I learned on a work computer that a TString may refer to a type of underwear and not just a library class.

  • A friend was seeking information about StripX, a product for stripping insulation from wires. I heard him say, "Note to self - do not type 'strip x' into Google in a family environment."

Heh I saw this the other day and just assumed that easter egg had always been there.