Another reason why adding site:reddit.com is so popular: Reddit's search is even more broken than Google and is useless for searching its own site.
Google Search Is Dying
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Re: Google Search Is Dying
#52Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…
Yep. How many bug reports are useful vs how many are "the button didn't work"?
Google is optimizing for that.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#53I can’t this article seriously:
> Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying.
What’s the connection between Reddit being searched for and Google dying? Read the article, doesn’t make sense.
Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where many projects have community discussions.
People are always saying Google is dying or search results are getting worse. How many sites existed in 2010? How many in 2022? How prevalent was SEO and content marketing then vs now.
The fact of the matter is that the web itself is becoming more littered with spam. Literally on HN there was a thread on how to make 50K a year and one person proudly stated they did so by using GPT-3 to create spam related to content they were selling.
Inherently any search engine with programmatic results can be gamed programmatically.
The chart in the article is easily explained by the fact that it’s hard to search those platforms using Google and that the internal search is more useful.
Reddit search has always sucked.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#54Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
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You have to search Yandex if you want English-language counter cultural (i.e. reactionary) content.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#55Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
> This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete…
This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn't quite pick up or don't know how to spell, or if I only remember fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in the right direction. That being said, I wish I could explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally. Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar. They have these kinds of prompt mechanics for GPT3, so I doesn't seem too unrealistic, even if it's all ML nowadays.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#56And the reason why these small communities are "more trustworthy" is moderation by actual humans. This is always the secret sauce. Google's biggest problem is that they think they can (and that they must) solve everything with automation, but any automated system can be defeated by a sufficiently motivated human.
This is an excellent point. There's the actual moderators who are, at minimum, filtering out spam. And then there are the human users voting, which I assume carries over in one way or another to Google's search ranking.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#57Ironically, Reddit search is terrible so you really have to use Google to do a thorough Reddit search. reddit + search term is a powerful combo on Google.
I do that all the time.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#58Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
reddit's search isn't that helpful though. I often get to reddit from Google, sometimes I even do site:reddit.com, but still using Google's search.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#59Still in shock that they killed reverse image search and replaced it with some useless AI tech demo.
It used to use the actual image and be able to provide context from where that image was found elsewhere. Now it seems to throw the image at AI and the AI will go "Oh that's a street" then they will just show you streets with similar colors as the image you put in.
Completely useless for trying to locate what movie a screenshot is from, or even similar images because the category searching is too general. Yandex image search completely blows it out of the water by being nothing more than a modern version of 2010 era Google Image Search.
Re: Google Search Is Dying
#60Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low.
The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on the website into the articles.
The result is trashy articles that could well have been written by a bot but aren't. This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we're far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work.
It's people but they work like bots.