posted in Technology
There’s a new “Google Jail” for independent wikis
weirdgloop.org/blog/google-jail
Replying to @lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com
Well, this explains the experience I had with the poe2 wiki 2 months ago. I could only find the poe1 wiki and thought it was so damn weird that there wasn't one for the sequel. Then a week or so later, a reddit thread had a comment to the poe2 wiki, and I was so confused why it hadn't shown up, when I specifically searched for it. smh. Glad to have that mystery solved!
I have switched to DuckDuckgo and while their index is crap, it’s at least more crap than what Google has.
DuckDuckgo I believe leases the Bing engine so I am still trying others.
also now I am using the direct search engines for specific sites… eg ‘@wiki <my search query>’ to use Wikipedias onwn search.
Replying to @DevDave@piefed.social
i have this problem. I use ddg sometimes to find wiki info, and if the piece of info is too new, ddg just gives me some clearly vibe-coded page with bogus information.
last week i waded through like 6 fake fields of Mistria wikis on the first page of ddg before giving up and finding the “official” ones on Google
Apologies if you already know this. Sharing because if you’re spending a lot of time searching a game wiki, this can be really convenient.
You can setup your browser for typing ‘@mistria juniper’ would bring up the wiki search page for everything related to that character.
disclaimer: I think Chromium can do this too
If you are often referring to a wiki, you can temporarily add it as a search engine to your browser’s internal location search bar.
With FireFox -> Settings -> Search -> “Add search engine” in the “Additional search engines”
I picked a random mistria wiki and the URL would be
https://fieldsofmistria.wiki.gg/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go&ns0=1 for searching.
For name ‘@mistria’ should be unique enough.
I got that by typing “test” in the search box to get this “https://fieldsofmistria.wiki.gg/wiki/Special:Search?search=Test&go=Go&ns0=1” just swap out the ‘Test’ for ‘%s’
Now press ctrl + l to focus on the location/search bar and type “@mistria juniper” to get an in wiki search results for everything related to that character.
One exception. if the url has something like ’nonce=a4F7DEF’ or other hex crap, it is probably not going to work and may get your IP temporarily blocked.
Custom searches are awesome! There might be an even easier way:
With Firefox, most of the time, you can right-click a web page’s search box and choose “Add Search Engine,” and you’ll get a box allowing you to give the search a name and a search bar keyword. Which you can edit later with Settings -> Search if needed.
Great suggestion and it works more often than not.