I use Kagi who returns excellent results, also when I need non AI verbatim queries.
Displaying what you searched for immediately is cannibalizing that market.
I'm guessing ads in AI results is the logical next step.
People don't know how to search, that's it. Even the HN population.
Every time this gets posted, I ask for one example of thing you tried to find and what keywords you used. So I'm giving you the same offer, give me for one thing you couldn't find easily on Google and the keywords you used, and I'll show you Google search is just fine.
How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive.
(note: luks, a few commands)
You will see a nonsensical ai summarization, lots of videos and junk websites being promoted then you'll likely find a few blogs with the actual commands needed. Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar.
This in the past had the no-ad straightforward blogs as first links, then some man pages, then other unrelated things for the same searches that i do now and get garbage.
try "mount luks encrypted file" or "luks file mount". too many words and any grammar at all will degrade your results. it's all about keywords
edit: after trying it myself i quickly realized the problem - luks related articles are usually about drives or partitions, not about files. this search got me what i wanted: "luks mount file -partition -filesystem" i found this article[1], which is in german (my native tongue), but contained the right information.
1: https://blog.netways.de/blog/2018/07/25/verschluesselten-fil...
It shoed 25 or so URLs as the source.
At the top there's a "featured snippet" from opensource.com, allegedly from 2021, that begins with: create an empty file (this turns out to mean a file of given size with no useful data in it, not a size-0 file), then make a LUKS volume using cryptsetup, etc.
First actual search result is a question on Ask Ubuntu (the Stack Exchange site dedicated to Ubuntu) headed "How do I create an encrypted filesystem inside a file?" which unless I'm confused is at least the correct question. Top answer there (from 2017) looks plausible and seems to be describing the same steps as the "featured snippet". A couple of other links to Ask Ubuntu are given below that one but they seem worse.
Next search result is a Reddit thread that describes how to do something different but possibly still of interest to someone who wants to do the thing you describe.
Next search result is a question on unix.stackexchange.com that turns out to be about something different; under it are other results from the same site, the first of which has a cryptsetup-based recipe that seems similar to the other plausible ones mentioned above.
Further search results continue to have a good density of plausible-looking answers to essentially the intended question.
This all seems fairly satisfactory assuming the specific answers don't turn out to be garbage, which doesn't look very likely; it seems like Google has done a decent job here. It doesn't specifically turn up the LUKS manual, but then that wasn't the question you actually asked.
Having done that search to find that the relevant command seems to be cryptsetup and the underlying facility is called LUKS, searches for <<cryptsetup manual>> and <<luks documentation>> (again, the first search terms that came to mind) look to me like they find the right things.
(Google isn't my first-choice search engine at present; DuckDuckGo provides similar results in all these cases.)
I am not taking any sides on the broader question of whether in general Google can give good search results if one picks the right words for it, but in this particular case it seems OK.
I still find online recipes convenient, but I don't blindly trust details like cooking time and temperature. (I mean, those things are always subject to variability, but now I don't trust the times to even be in the right ballpark.)
Happily, there are some cooks that I think deserve our trust, e.g. Chef John.
Badly summarise articles.
Outright invent local attractions that don’t exist.
Gave subtly wrong, misleading advice about employment rights.
All while coming across as confidently authoritative.
That "AI generated slop" IS Google's main response now. I posted it so that someone might have a look to see if/how correct it actually is, your response, that does not deign to even look, is less than helpful - if you want to complain about Google not being useful, how about your own response?
As I said, user issue.
> Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar.
Yes, thankfully. The man page for cryptsetup isn't exactly palatable.
> Yes, thankfully. The man page for cryptsetup isn't exactly palatable.
The man page is the source of truth and quite good, that it's not one of the first links or even on the first page is a problem.
Usually references hard drive articles and even AI slop that says same thing.
End of the first page, there's one link to something that solves it, so I might take this hint, thanks.
> luks file mount
This actually has a decent first link... so, yeah... cool