Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of paid content on the mattress subs and I'm sure many others
Mattress subs?
Mattresses have ridiculous margins, so astroturfing is likely.
Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
81–90 of 142 posts
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#82It’s not google thats getting worse, it’s the overall internet. I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects or sealing them off. Similarly, companies will limit access to ensure monetisation. No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange. The dead internet is even more likely to happen.
> I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects
This will just lead to forks (if your project was popular).
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually started going directly to the Reddit app and finding the relevant subreddit and searching within it - hope Reddit realizes the gold mine it’s sitting on but I doubt it.
I've found reddit first party search to be pretty lack luster. More often than not, I'd have to fallback to Googling "site:reddit.com/r/subreddit-of-interest " and while better, that's about a 50/50 a lot of the time. Reddit does this thing where it advertises other threads on the same page of whatever you're viewing. So sometimes the promoted content was the thing actually relevant to the search and not the current…
Thanks for the tip. I'll try this next time I'm about to spend ten minutes searching for some After Effects effect or shortcut.
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#84I dont think I have ever got a quality search result by appending reddit. Cant for the life of me figure out how HN users find useful results there. chatgpt has improved search for me by orders of magnitude. Especially since google has started to border on useless. Bur searching reddit? Meh. Not for technical stuff at least. Niche high quality subs may point me in the right direction. Like r/ponds for example. Wonder…
Reddit is one of the few places where you can find an honest (on average) discussion between common people about a variety of topics. This is very unique if you understand that the world is a complex beast and yes/no or authoritative answers may not be the best way to learn about it. Having perspective of many people that you can parse and apply to your own world model is very powerful, be it politics, local events or headphone reviews, personal experiences, relationships.
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#85It’s not google thats getting worse, it’s the overall internet. I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects or sealing them off. Similarly, companies will limit access to ensure monetisation. No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange. The dead internet is even more likely to happen.
> I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects This will just lead to forks (if your project was popular).
Well i am not talking about impulsive “make repo private” type of action but rather the team that maintains large open source projects to take coordinated action in moving, removing or updating the license of their projects.
Forking code is not an issue - i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance.
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
everything else is content farms or SEO spam. No! The rest of the content is still there, loads of it. Google simple has stopped caring, no it is not "too hard", they just don't care enough. Case in point, Google even aids in crappy results, by aliasing your search terms, preventing precision, putting monetization above all else. Google sucks . SEO/spam is not worse, Google is, they know it, they do not care, because…
Good point. Do you find that other search engines like Kagi resolve the issue?
I tried Kagi and liked it. I also find using 'verbatim' searches on Google helps, although that seems to be broken more and more often.
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
They just use Bing user the hood and the results are awful. I use some browsers that default to Bing/DuckDuckGo and every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away. Bing seems to surface a lot more unrelated or spam my websites at the top of the results.
Sounds like a layer 8 issue, I have been using ddg as my main search engine and I always find what I need on the first page. Every time I stumble in to google I am appalled at how bad the UX is.
I'd suggest a different explanation.
Think about what OP said here for a second:
>every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away
If you assume both Google and Bing to be similarly good but not the same, then you would expect this to happen.
Say there are two sets of websites, the ones that Bing finds (B+) and some that it doesn't (B-).
The same would hold for Google, there would be G+ and G-.
Now if you search on Bing first, and find what you need, you stop. This is a result in B+.
If you don't find it, your result is in B-. Then you search in Google and maybe get a G+ result, since they have different sets of websites they find.
You might also not find it (G-) but in the end both search engines aren't that bad, so this rarely happens.
Now you might find the same result if you start on Google instead, and aren't lucky in the first go, and then try Bing.
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They just use Bing user the hood and the results are awful. I use some browsers that default to Bing/DuckDuckGo and every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away. Bing seems to surface a lot more unrelated or spam my websites at the top of the results.
Sounds like a layer 8 issue, I have been using ddg as my main search engine and I always find what I need on the first page. Every time I stumble in to google I am appalled at how bad the UX is.
> layer 8
TIL[0]:
> Layer 8 is a term used to refer to user or political layer on top of the 7-layer OSI model of computer networking.
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#89Google should buy Reddit and run it like a non profit, keep the users happy. But also they can use it for LLM training and put it into the Google index.
Google groups and Google+ say hi
Re: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
#90This is the biggest benefit reddit provided to the user base. Google search has been lackluster and appending the word reddit allowed me to see plenty of good anecdotal and informative focused discussions without fluffing up the content for SEO.
I see people say this all the time, can you give me an example of your search queries? I never had to search reddit specific stuff but I do add 'github' all the time.
I've been searching for a new camera to buy. Rather than reading general reviews from blogs where I don't know if they're sponsored or not through a Google search, I was searching "Fujifilm x-h2s review reddit" or "best camera under $2000 reddit" on Google instead. I've found a lot of the time, it can be hard to tell if a blog post from a Google search has actually used the product, or is just keyword spamming and hoping for a referral fee. Especially if I'm looking to buy something in an area I'm not familiar with and don't know the trusted review sites yet. Granted this can still happen on Reddit but I assume it is rarer.
I've also found that if I search for something directly on Reddit, I get all sorts of results. Some related, some tangential. And a lot of the time there's porn or NSFW content mixed in.