431–440 of 1001 posts
In case anyone else does this and is tired of typing `site:reddit` all the time, checkout the Mycroft project for search engine plugins. I use one in particular[1] and alias it to `.r` in Firefox.
[1] https://mycroftproject.com/install.html?id=33343&basename=go...
It's already dead. Google mined all the links that were curated by the initial internet communities for all it was worth and turned them into profits for Google's earliest employees and shareholders. Now that no one is curating useful links anymore their search quality, unsurprisingly, is deteriorating. Without human curation there is no signal for Google to use anymore and whatever signal is there is just SEO spam t…
Google made links on the web the measure of how good a page was. That became the target of everyone trying to do SEO. As a result, it stopped being a good measure of how good a page was.
But in the long run, nothing will work in that environment, because every measure will be gamed as soon as people figure out that Google is using it. Google's only choice is to try to stay ahead of the SEO crowd, and I'm not sure they can do that (well) for too much longer. In fact, if the article is to be believed, they're already starting to fail.
I've been using Google Search since it was a cool beta site announced on Slashdot. Over the years I've built a career based on my ability to effectively search. I remember about ten years ago, people thought I had some kind of insane gift because I could immediately find ANYTHING. Not really, I just had an instinctive skill for creating effective queries.
Good search has been a huge part of my ability to develop software. I don't mean StackOverflow either. I learned to use Google to search Microsoft APIs and forums, as well as to dig up long obscure posts on the almost-dead languages and technologies I found myself supporting. Day by day, this is less and less possible. I'm losing a critical tool that has helped me be productive.
As an Autistic one of my strengths is feeling patterns in systems, and in the past few years, I've definitely noticed the garbage results described in this article.
Yesterday, my wife asked me if we have any cold meds. I said, "we have several, but let's look up interactions with your new antidepressant." I know from experience that all kinds of unpleasant side effects can arise from mixing these.
On her phone search results, there were none of the quality sites I expected, such as Drugs.com. Instead I had to crawl through a bunch of SEO garbage and psuedo-health to find what I needed. If she was doing this on her own, she might have clicked on something dangerously erroneous. The web is becoming increasingly hostile. (And don't get me started about the infinitely scrollable boomer ads that come up below a local news story)
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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 t…
Speaking of bots, I'd be interested to know the percentage of articles on major traffic content sites are authored or co-authored by AI. My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking diversity of opinion and content. It's like a en…
I've noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries. There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals. At least going with a community site ther…
It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.
They're not dying if the people are still using Google for their searches.
Reddit search is awful. They could try to make a Google alternative but search is very hard. #1 query on Bing is "Google" for a reason.
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Searching Reddit helps but the quality of comments has gotten lower since 2015 or so. It seems to coincide with the wave of subreddit bans and the nakedly politically-driven moderation on subreddits. And with the reflexive attitude—against anything countering the Reddit consensus—that developed during the Trump years. High quality posters seem to have withdrawn from the site (at least in how much they comment) and wh…
Quality on any non niche popular subreddits were already abysmal long before 2015. Reddit is useless for anything which is not highly specific but there are some diamonds in the rough: great subreddits exists about fashion, knives, gardening, coffee, shaving and plenty of other weird interests.
An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…
Yeah, those pages are definitely auto-generated. Static site generation makes it possible for those types of pages (I call them "shims") to jump to the top of the results list. I wrote about it here: https://zestyrx.com/blog/nextjs-ssg
I don't think it's sustainable in the long run and the barrier of entry to make a solid search engine is lowering every year - there are several solid alternatives where before it was a unfunny joke to assert there would be a proper google competitor 5 short years ago.
I don't think Google is going to fix this, the fact that it has evolved to where it is today is a result of concerted and persistent product focus in that direction.
High hopes that we'll see a better-than-google alternative break out in the near future.