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The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.
I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.
(I also manage sites myself and they've been doing some heavy A/B testing the last couple of weeks, but we have to wait and see how big of an impact it will actually have.)
[0]: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1656362551456993288
[1]: https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2Gw...
For people who don't want to click the Twitter link:
> We're also improving how we rank results in Search overall. Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.
it's not just google. it's the web. all of the web's useful information--decades of discussion--is stored in reddit's garage. and they've decided to close the door.
My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.
The winners of this battle will be the places where content is generated (or curated) - and reddit is perhaps the most important content hub generator (it's not just an aggregator anymore - comments about some news can be often more interesting than the news itself). Indexers (and language models) are useless without content to scrap.
Google should really buy reddit so that they have some search results to point to
My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.
My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.
It is more than the spam war...a lot of content is just no longer produced and exposed to the open web (think about how much content goes into tiktok, discord, etc and you will never get that into your search results). Google has less useful content to index, algorithms can't fix that. There is more spam only because that's the only open content that gets added massively. The winners of this battle will be the places…
Seems most queries result in something like 30% SEO spam sites, 30% quora, 30% reddit, 10% other.
Edit: I don't disagree that Discord/Youtube/Other closed gardens have taken open searchable data away, but it's not like there's now no authentic searchable data at all. Perhaps Google also needs to learn to search those closed gardens better.
it's not just google. it's the web. all of the web's useful information--decades of discussion--is stored in reddit's garage. and they've decided to close the door.
It probably would be a more effective campaign for subreddits to have their users wipe all their old comments (older than 1 year) than a temporary blackout for a few days.
My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.
Google's recency bias in search results hurts them too. There are many older resources which are still valid out there, but you won't find them (easily) via Google Search. Instead, you get the SEO spam which doesn't match the search as well, but is newer.
NEWS (heh it contains new) is important to be up-to-date and recent.
But so many things are olds and you should give more weight to older pagerank-verified pages.