search results in failure

The Issue: Pressing the shutter button halfway down works as intended, allowing me to lock focus. But pressing the button the rest of the way results in a temporary black screen in the EVF, then it just goes back to the regular EVF view. There is no shutter click, no photo taken. Bonus: Occasionally the EVF itself just goes black on its own, though this seems more intermittent.

Possible ways to find a solution:

1. Take the camera to a local camera store
2. Ask friends, family or other people I know
3. Do a web search on the internet

Issues:

1. May require an up-front fee, likely repair cost will be disproportionate to the cost/value of the camera (that is, way more than I’m willing to pay)
2. I don’t know anyone with enough expertise to diagnose

And let’s expand on #3:

What it comes down to is this: Web search now sucks. And yes, it’s because of Google and its push for ads, AI and other nonsense that has trained site builders to optimize (SEO!) garbage that will get pushed to the top of searches, resulting in a web that is mostly junk pages full of keywords, listicles and not much useful information. And if you use another search engine like DuckDuckGo or Bing (which is one of the engines used in aggregate by DDG) you still suffer because all those crappy pages are still going to turn up, thanks to Google’s dominance in search.

Shorter version: I expect a lot of garbage results, with no genuinely useful tips or solutions. And this ignores another thing that Google isn’t even responsible for: The tendency to find many people asking the same question, but no one ever providing an answer.

Observe: Someone posting on a public forum: “Hey guys. I have Problem X. Anyone know how to fix it?” Three days pass. Same person: “FYI, got a fix, you can go ahead and close this thread!” In which the person never offers to others what the fix was.

I mean, I’ll break down and do a search eventually, but it ain’t going to be pretty. I will, of course, provide full details here.

Google is a big company–so big they created a new one called Alphabet to stuff Google into. Since starting their search engine in 1997, Google has come to dominate both web searches (92%) and web browsers (65%), with Google search and Google Chrome, respectively. Google is a company built on advertising and harvesting user data. They are big enough now that they are trying and in some cases succeeding in pushing web standards that suit them, forcing others to follow along.

Part of the perpetuation of Google as the dominant player comes from writers using “Google” as a generic verb. You don’t search, you “Google.” This is bad because it entrenches Google needlessly, reinforcing in people’s minds that there is only one way to search on the internet, and that is by going to google.com.

Google’s dominance has led us to a point where it regularly steers search results toward SEO garbage that benefits the company (and those it does business with), but not necessarily the users. They have promised moves to improve searching, even as they work to cripple most ad blockers.

Here’s the thing, though.

Look at this screenshot from an article published today on engadget about finding a good productivity mouse:

I am honestly perplexed why any editorial staff on these sites would allow writers to do this. I wonder if the author of the piece had written “Bing around” (yes, I know, it is funny to say that out loud), would an editor have run a red line through it and suggested something else. What would they have suggested?

This may seem like a nitpick, but it bugs me because:

• It is sloppy and lazy writing
• It perpetuates a commercial product (Google search) as the “proper” way to do or use something

In conclusion, use DuckDuckGo. Or even Bing. Or one of the boutique search engines in closed beta that think people will pay for a “good” search experience (it’s possible!). But mostly, stop using “Google” to mean “search.”