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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

#81

Post by dabluecaboose »

bufio wrote: post #3

The mainstream web seems to be crumpling under the weight of its enshittification.

Enshittification was already causing reddit to ruin google results.

Reddit's new garbage redesign contains other posts from a subreddit in the page. So often times you'll google a term and get a link that looks like exactly the post you want, but it ends up being a different post in the same subreddit, and the one you were looking for was just in the suggested posts for that one.

Also, reddit has ruined filtering by time somehow. I'll often try to search for information on e.g. a new update for a game and find posts from years ago about old mechanics, despite filtering to "last 30 days"

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

#82

Post by professorsnep »

takoid wrote: post #52
OptionX wrote: post #18

Protip: If you really need to see the Reddit page on a private'd sub remember Google has a cached page feature.

Where did Google move the cached page feature? I can’t find it in the three dot menu for search results anymore.

If you click on the three-dot menu, there's a small caret button you have to click to show more of the pill buttons at the top, and one of them is "Cached". It feels like every time I need to use that button it's moved somewhere new.

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

#83

Post by supernikio2 »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

It's getting worse by the minute, too. What used to be a subreddit might now be a Discord server, which is in my opinion even worse, keeping solutions/questions to certain issues within Discord's own walls.

You now have to enter a server, search for your specific problem, and, if not found, ask someone and wait for them to respond. If results are on the first page of google it's much more friction-less and convenient imho.

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

#84

Post by davidktr »

Simulacra wrote: post #39

I'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.

Same search pattern as you. I have the verification problem only if I do it from the net of my research organization, never if I do it privately. Not sure why, just a pattern I observed.

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

#85

Post by jameson71 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #25

Google should be more pro-active in checking its results health and present cached versions if underlying sources are gone. It's not only about reddit, I also have plenty of websites which don't open in my computer (either because my country banned them or because they banned my country) and Google still presents those pages in my search results, wasting my time.

Google used to offer this functionality, but it seems to have disappeared over the past year. It was never automatic, but there were 3 vertical dots to the right of the list with a "more info" menu.

There is also the wayback archive.

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

#86

Post by moi2388 »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #33

I 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…

I think affiliate deals should be banned. I hate it that much. Whilst you’re at it, van advertisement without consent. You can use the kids argument if necessary.

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

#87

Post by s1artibartfast »

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.

I wonder if Google wants to prioritize video to try to address this spam problem.

Sometimes when I search a topic all I get is video in the natural results, not a video search, and I suspect I'm part of an A versus B test.

I personally don't find it to be a compelling solution and click away because I'm not willing to sift through 10 10 minute videos to see if there is relevant content.

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

#88

Post by judge2020 »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

Centralization was always inevitable with scale.

New users aren't going to spend the same amount of time and brainpower managing their internet presence as OGs do/have. So they will choose the services that enable them to reduce the overhead of using the internet. For many, this doesn't just mean using Reddit for their interest-based communities, but using Gmail for spam prevention, Apple products for their curated store, Steam for ease of access, etc.

This would only be solvable if you had government-forced interop so that e.g. Twitter posts were accessible on Mastodon timelines with no cost to the site operators, but even then any small barrier is something for a platform to optimize and sell in the form of a subscription/using their user base for ads.

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

#90

Post by jmholla »

takoid wrote: post #52
OptionX wrote: post #18

Protip: If you really need to see the Reddit page on a private'd sub remember Google has a cached page feature.

Where did Google move the cached page feature? I can’t find it in the three dot menu for search results anymore.

There's an expansion to the three dots that has a cache option. Still don't know how to do it with the secondary results for a domain.
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