Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit?
Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?
The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
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Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#32The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.
I think curated indexes, with associated search, will come back. Yahoo! was before its time. Now we need a human-curated search engine/index that only has verified human generated content. I guess everything goes in cycles.
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#33I noticed this too when I was trying to search for local opinions like affordable clothing in netherlands and for general recommendations like cloud storage with execellent file management.
Without reddit, outdated generic blogs with affliate links show up. They are just advertisement in disguise and not the genuine opinions which I'm looking for.
In a way this shows the value of Reddit. Even with their awful UI and app, their users seems to provide the most value to search queries.
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#34I 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.
Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaulted to this when I was looking for, e.g., product reviews -- because it would bypass the endless SEO spam where someone found some highly-rated products on Amazon and published an article "reviewing" them.
Unfortunately, Google killed that search type. There are some browser extensions and bookmarklets that help, mostly by creating a very complicated search query that looks for specific things in the URL, but the discussion search is something I still mourn.
For what it's worth, my technique these days is to find a forum which has a large amount of discussion, then add a site filter to my Google query and only search that site. For something like product reviews, I can usually find the lesser-known products that don't show up on the SEO lists, at which point I now have a good keyword to find other enthusiast discussions online, which begins to open a lot of doors.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite refined the method for anything other than product reviews. At this point, I've started just using ChatGPT for factual questions before trying Google. :(
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#35My 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 real problem isn't that Google can't detect what spam is, it's that this spam drives so much of the traffic, and thus their revenue that they cannot remove it. Google at this point is literally teaming up with spammers. Just go on a android phone and swipe left from homepage for "Google", count how many clicks it takes to get to an 100% AI generated spam page.
for those of us without an android device to try this, care to enlighten us? the way it is described it sounds like a lot of of action required which seems like a good thing, but your point seems like it's trying to make goog's results bad. i'm really not following your point
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That would just be wanton destruction of information. Scorched Earth
Sometimes destruction is the only way forward.
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#37it'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.
there have been a bunch of scripts going around to automate this, unsure how many people have actually used them
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#38The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.
I think curated indexes, with associated search, will come back. Yahoo! was before its time. Now we need a human-curated search engine/index that only has verified human generated content. I guess everything goes in cycles.
We have their modernized update of that already: pay to play adwords, which is the end state of a for profit curated directory
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#39I've really gotten frustrated with google over the years and I've switched to Bing. Is Microsoft better? Probably not, but I'm a researcher, and I search fast and significantly. Google is constantly asking me to verify if I'm a human, Bing doesn't do that. I recognize that may be an individual issue, but on a broader spectrum, Bing works well.
Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes
#40I 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 hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google
Google checks it's bank account, hits the snooze button, and goes back to sleep