I recently had occasion to use Google searches to support a brake job on my truck and a software/hardware issue with Fedora 38.
God the results were amazingly bad.
I got the Fedora issue fixed. The big issue with the Google results is that you can't really restrict the results to Fedora 38 only. Google wants to give me 3 million results and not the 30 I really need. You can't tell what version of Fedora a lot of the results were for and they didn't work. Even if it was a Fedora or Red Had website. I finally found a result where someone mentioned that it was the H264 codec that was the problem. Focusing on that got me the fix. Which allowed me to realize that if anyone on the Fedora team though about my use case,: the infrequent and obscure use of a web browser to stream a video, the problem never would have occurred.
But that is for another rant.
I'm thinking I want to do a startup for a search engine that prioritizes results that include all the search terms and appropriately implements and, not, or, and maybe shows the date the result was created or first found (some websites do this and I really like it). Maybe we could use Google's data. Maybe we could rank the results some other way than the number of times someone clicked on it or haw it fits into our ad strategy. Maybe get feedback. Maybe use AI.
I did get the brake drum fixed, but mostly by using what I already knew. None of the information and YouTube videos actually provided the information necessary to successfully do the job and most left major safety issues unaddressed. The ones at the top of the results did seem to be doing a good job selling things like rust penetrants and showing how to spary them is places where they don't do any good. One of the places they said was a cover you should remove so you could spray some magic stuff was actually the cover for the star adjuster on the drum brake. This has to be manually backed off so you can remove the drum. Seeing this video reminded me that I hadn't done that. You can't pull the drum unless you do that. Nothing mentioned this step. Yet they all showed smiling happy people taking the drum off. Some with really impressive background music. You have to be careful when working the bleed nipple so that you don't get air in the cylinder. No one mentioned this. You should ckeck the level in the reservoir when you are done. In fact, one encouraged you to "just drive off, you're all done". If you had actually done the job, you would have backed off the star wheel. This is the self adjuster. It is now not adjusting and you should back up a short distance and apply the brakes firmly a few times to get it readjusted. Otherwise, you have no rear brakes when you stop
-Gary