I know I should be over search engine & algorithm etc shenanigans, but I feel like Goodreads didn't used to be like this; I typed in INHERITORS (the entire title of hardcover book published in 2020 checked out from public library so ... not like a zine with no ISBN that someone mimeographed 99 copies of in the 1970s and distributed by hand at one rally in Topeka, KS) and seven books that don't even have that specific word show up before this one that I'm looking for!
Instead we see
- The Art of Inheriting Secrets
- It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
- Inherit the Wind
- The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School
- Inherit the Night (Gentleman Bastard, #7)
- Inheriting Edith
- Fables, Vol. 17: Inherit the Wind
Allllllll of that fucking bullshit before we get to what I'm looking for:
This shit shouldn't surprise and enrage me every time it happens after almost two entire decades of google cunting up anybody looking for my super-campy, super-specific, super-not-used-by-anyone-else performance name which is also my domain name which is obviously what someone is looking for when they type it in. But search engines don't care what you -- THE SEEKER -- are really looking for; they only care about people paying for ad placement and fake sites with fake content designed and composed with nonsense to be "optimized" for search engine placement to make it APPEAR you have what people are looking for so just a bunch of maniacally repeated keywords and redundant bullshit phrases. And if you are in any way pornographic, it's pretty much impossible to even pay to be ranked higher by search engines.
But that's not what the problem is with Goodreads. I'm guessing search just got shittier when they (had to) give/gave in to Amazon. I could be wrong, though. And it's such a pointless losing game of frustration to dig deeper (and the algorithms chance so frequently) that I don't want to bother researching it.
Is part of the problem that maybe most people do not bother to type what they're looking for in full and/or correctly, and everything is adjusted for that? Which is fucking STUPID, even if true, since if someone types a real word into a fucking BOOK search engine that corresponds EXACTLY with an actual fucking BOOK that exists on that site ... JESUS.
It's like the generational difference I notice between someone my age (49 in 2002 / born in 1973) vs people ten or twenty years younger than I am; when they watch me search for, say, a video on YouTube and get annoyed when I keep typing instead of fucking pausing after a couple of letters for autocomplete / predictive text / what-have-you to GUESS what I'm looking for (tell me I don't know what I want and suggest some other popular bullshit I'm not even looking for man I need to write a few jokes / hilarious examples here) ... I fear there are, like, two+ generations of people at this point who grew up with shit being fucked up like this, that they're waiting TO BE TOLD what they're looking for. That they don't ever even know, that they're just completely conditioned to feel a vague interest in something then LET THE MACHINES tell them what it SHOULD be before they've even fully formulated any actual desire or clarified any genuine need. It's scary as fuck. And, for better or worse, it's also fucking untrue because kids these days ... the way these fuckers will drill down to micronuanced minutiae ... JFC.
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