[ashleyn]

The one example I usually give people is the one that led me to the realisation myself.

Try searching "how valve index works" or "how valve index controllers work". My interpretation of "how it works" is "technical information on how an item operates". Google will interpret this instead as "how well it performs its intended functions" and flood me with both links to purchase the Valve Index as well as endless reviews. Results on Google are not tailored toward retrieval of factual information anymore. They're tailored to ordinary, garden-variety consumers, and obviously designed to sell you a Valve Index.

To this day I still have not found really good information on how the controllers in the Valve Index actually work. All I get are pushes and nudges into getting me to buy something.

[moultano]

Those are good examples! I'll pass them along to debug. I think what's happening is that the wording is ambiguous enough that it's colliding with concepts like "how well does valve index work." If you search for "how does valve index tracking work" then you get results like this, which is more in line with what you're looking for. https://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-valve-s-amazing-lighthouse-t...

[prox]

While this mic is on, also fix the time ranges for some queries. If you search “best Wordpress plugin for exporting data” , Google often gives me 4 to 5 year old links. Current top result is from 2017... where some plugins don’t even exist anymore :)

[numpad0]

I think what happened was they pivoted from _document search_ to an interactive oracle app. I would have used “index controller principles” to get the documents describing it, which no longer works. And I think what you want is the document search back.

And these days they throw a lot of machine translated ripoff sites as well as some malvertising dummy type sites. It’s really something.

[rrdharan]

> I still have not found really good information on how the controllers in the Valve Index actually work.

Isn’t the Occam’s razor explanation here just that that information is not actually available on the web - not that Google is hiding it from you?

[rexreed]

Not in this case:

See the first page of results for DDG's search on how valve index works:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=how+valve+index+works&atb=v...

Compare to Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+valve+index+works

[nl]

On Google I get some Wikipedia extracted information that says:

"The Valve Index Controllers have a joystick, touchpad, two face buttons, a menu button, a trigger, and an array of 87 sensors that allow the controllers to track hand position, finger position, motion, and pressure to create an accurate representation of the user's hand in virtual reality." with a link to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Index

The first raw result is: https://www.pocket-lint.com/ar-vr/news/steam/147913-valve-in...

That's the same link as DDG uses as its first result.

The second Google link is a YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD8Y9gcPGzs) that has details about "optics and resolution". The second DDG link is about sprinkers (https://www.sprinklersavings.com/blog/how-an-indexing-valve-...).

Google seems a lot better on this query.

[selfhoster11]

Then they should just come out and say it: "no results found".

Not returning results at all seems to be stigmatised these days for every site.

[Frost1x]

Not being correct is stigmatized in all aspects of society anymore, thanks to ever increasing business leadership mentality invading our culture. Being wrong, failing, etc. is no longer acceptable. You have to provide the appearance of success in the absence of success.

I don't know why we as a culture can't accept that people fail and fail often. A bit more humility would do everyone some good instead of setting constant unrealistic expectations that hampers all aspects of society. It's completely bananas.