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gerdesjlast Thursday at 12:08 AM1 replyview on HN

"seems like even some of the simplest searches are just packed with AI generated and SEO garbage"

I'll give you a concrete example of that and it is a right old pain.

Let's try upgrading Debian Bullseye to Bookworm. Search "upgrade debian bullseye to bookworm" - first hit from DDG is: https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes... - YES - Debian documentation, staid, verbose, stolid and correct.

Now let's try to upgrade a Raspberry Pi from Bullseye to Bookworm: Search "upgrade raspberry pi bullseye to bookworm". First hit: https://raspberrytips.com/upgrade-raspberry-pi-os-bookworm/.

There are loads more hits like the above and they are nearly all wrong. The RPI distribution is based on Debian Linux but has a few differences. Between those two versions of Debian, RPi changed things in /boot quite dramatically and failing to do that, you will end up with a weird chimera - I created several of these beasts until I fixed them: https://blog.scheib.me/2024/04/14/upgrade-raspberry-bullseye...

In this case it may actually be a blog matching the template of the AI clones! However, they do all look very similar.


Replies

raframlast Thursday at 4:17 AM

Google does perfectly on the latter search. It returns a relevant blog post written by an actual human, and a bunch of forum threads about that exact upgrade path.

DDG has never been very good.