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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

#51

Post by reaperducer »

diegocg wrote: post #14
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #9

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…

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)

I see this all the time when trying to find information about old computers. So many of the good vintage computing resources are locked in social services or mailing lists that the information never shows up in search engines.

It feels a lot like the days when information was balkanized between AOL, GEnie, CompuServe, American PeopleLink, Delphi, etc.

Search engines were supposed to fix that and make all the world's information discoverable. They didn't.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#53

Post by zelphirkalt »

eugenekolo wrote: post #17
diegocg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. 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…

A huge portion of those blogs are medium and other bad blogging providers, possibly with paywall.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#54

Post by basch »

nocsi wrote: post #47
falcolas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Google biased, or are it’s users biased? If someone is looking up something technical or diagnosing a problem, the most recent post on StackOverflow would be more relevant. Old stuff can be important, but if users searches mostly comprise recent stuff - what’s the point?

Recipes. Historical things.

There are way too many google searches where the best result was the top 10 years ago, and still should be the top. Instead it’s something from this year that has no information.

Googling is now like talking to that person who repeats your question back to you as a statement, as if they added to the conversations. The results are some social media manager who’s job it is to make “content” by writing filler.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#55

Post by boomboomsubban »

dylan604 wrote: post #46
mentos wrote: post #31

Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit? Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?

the realistic opp for Reddit is to charge Google access to the API which would more than cover all of the other API users. If Googs can afford to pay Apple and others to have their search be the default, they can afford to pay to crawl Reddit too

Reddit claims that is their goal, they're just doing it terribly making it hard to trust that it's actually their goal.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#56

Post by 6D794163636F756 »

nocsi wrote: post #47
falcolas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Google biased, or are it’s users biased? If someone is looking up something technical or diagnosing a problem, the most recent post on StackOverflow would be more relevant. Old stuff can be important, but if users searches mostly comprise recent stuff - what’s the point?

I think it's user bias. It's shockingly hard to get Google to default to docs on Java 17 over java 8. Users want 8 so Google servers that even if it isn't as new.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#57

Post by nocsi »

MAGZine wrote: post #5

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.

And for the people not on Reddit, they’re having their discussions in discord. So much for the web.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#58

Post by adventured »

mentos wrote: post #31

Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit? Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?

I think it does. They're busy self-sabotating at the moment. They have never properly figured out search though, that aspect of Reddit has been mediocre since the beginning. There is reason to be skeptical that they could figure it out now, given their other product/feature development; they appear incapable of doing it effectively.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#59

Post by reaperducer »

simion314 wrote: post #42
eugenekolo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe that. There's still so many personal blogs by real people. They just don't show up in the first 3 pages unless you query for them very specifically. 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…

For me YouTube is always on the top, instead of the text pages where I can read the answer in a few seconds Google pushes me their video platform, probably in the hope of making money. I am logged in so I do not understand how those geniuses working at Google would think that videos in a language I do not know might be more relevant then text content.

For me YouTube is always on the top, instead of the text pages where I can read the answer in a few seconds Google pushes me their video platform, probably in the hope of making money.

To be fair, i have the same problem with Duck.

I wish i could backlist sites from my search results. YouTube and Pinterest are not helpful for the things i look for.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#60

Post by clnq »

nocsi wrote: post #47
falcolas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Google biased, or are it’s users biased? If someone is looking up something technical or diagnosing a problem, the most recent post on StackOverflow would be more relevant. Old stuff can be important, but if users searches mostly comprise recent stuff - what’s the point?

I have some old articles on my blog that always decrease in readership. I do a pass every year, change a paragraph here and there, change the alias/url, and then get 5x the readership for a few months. Rinse and repeat. Most of my traffic comes from Google. Also, most of my content is in such a specific niche that it doesn’t really age much in 5 years.

So recency bias kinda works against people discovering useful content. But whatever. Google is in decline anyways.

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