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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

#101

Post by waboremo »

bombcar wrote: post #20
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.

This is a huge, huge, huge problem and Google I feel could work to solve this. 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.

All of the Google sections seem to be terrible for their use case. Images are lacking filters and are filled with Pinterest results which send people into a cycle when trying to get to the actual image to save. News will sometimes show old news when it's obvious there should be new information about whatever you're searching, leading you to have to specifically indicate sort by date. Videos will prioritize certain domains even if the video itself is irrelevant to your search (ie searching up an actress, it'll show an IMDB video first, even if the video is very old and is just a generic trailer for some movie they were in ages ago). If you search something relatively generic, the new search bubbles will now hide the other categories (ie searching adele will hide categories like shopping or books). The finance option literally just redirects you to Google Finance now, doesn't even retain your search.

They've really let the core search experience be deteriorated so extensively, that we can't blame all of it on SEO.

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

#102

Post by lisper »

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…

Email is dying too. I have run my own email server for 20 years. A few years ago my original ISP was acquired, forcing me to switch providers and hence get a new IP address. Ever since then my server has been blacklisted by one major player or another as a source of spam. I even tried changing to a new IP address, but the result of that was just a different set of providers blacklisting me. I'm about ready to throw in the towel and switch to Fastmail. :-(

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

#103

Post by acchow »

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…

> Perhaps Google also needs to learn to search those closed gardens better.

There's a hard limit at what is allowed by robots.txt since Google abides by this standard.

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

#104

Post by jeffbee »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #91
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…

Honestly I’d LOVE to revert to the old phpBB or vBulletin forum days There’s literally no reason why not and it’s never been cheaper to run

99% of phpBB installations were pwned and distributing malware. It’s a terrible model. If we want small distributed operation of software like that we need a revolution in software operability and quality.

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

#105

Post by dghughes »

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…

reddit isn't doing so well either. The locking of posts was a terrible idea. The old.reddit vs reddit shows many like the old style. Hate the app.

All the information on reddit is user generated yet the reddit owners seems to think they own it. My view is the "frontpage" doesn't own the story just because they printed it.

Back in the 1990s I feel users were much more cable and there was so many more pages or forums especially as you noted forums.

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

#106

Post by willio58 »

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…

I think what's happening with Twitter and Reddit is actually a good thing in that it's exposing the failures of centralized networks. The thing is, these failures aren't big enough yet for people to jump ship and I think the main problem is none of the decentralized social networks have provided a solution that's better.

Mastodon is theoretically a better version of Twitter, but normal people get lost the moment someone starts talking about "instances". It's this gap we need to cross somehow. How do networks provide all or most of the pros of being centralized without being centralized?

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

#107

Post by bobthepanda »

deeviant wrote: post #22
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.

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.

We have all those posts kvetching about how small email providers have become collateral damage in the arms race against email spam. I don’t think anyone is truly successful in that space.

The issue is that ML is very expensive compared to spam generation. And the moment another search engine becomes popular, then the spam cannons will be used against it instead.

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

#108

Post by pradn »

Google can't index an internet that doesn't exist. The open web is truly dying.

I believe in the open web, but it seems like an ideological position, not something most people want to participate in. (Just like decentralization!) There's a few reasons:

1. Putting things on the web means your words are public, so they can be archived forever, and anyone can look at them. Do I want employers looking at my high school blog? (Hell, mine is still up, go look it up and you'll find things I no longer believe are appropriate!) Recall that keeping posts private was an important innovation w/ Facebook, over MySpace, which was largely all-public.

2. Most people don't want to bother with hosting their own website. It costs money and requires expertise to run. And it can easily go awry (DDOS attacks! getting hacked! losing your domain!).

3. If you don't want to bother with hosting your own site, you are at the mercy of platforms that always (always!) devolve into bloat, over-commercialization, and perhaps censorship. Medium, Reddit, Wordpress.com, Tumblr - you name it!

4. Most people don't want to put the effort into writing/posting anything beyond basic food/vacation photos or whatnot. Even the people hyper-engaged in politics online are a minority. How often did people write a diary, even, before the internet. Putting in this sort of effort is not something most people want to do. I don't blame them - life's busy and work/school takes the lion's share of everyone's energy. Look at me - all I do is post comments on HN! I haven't updated my two-page static website in years!

5. It's lonely running a website! There's no guaranteed engagement, as there is with posting an Insta story or a Facebook profile picture. It really is like shouting into the void. Yes, one can join a web-ring, but you could also make your own butter...

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

#109

Post by rodric »

reaperducer wrote: post #59
simion314 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How great is your wish? If you host your own instance of Whoogle, which gives Google search results, you can set one of the environment variables to block particular websites from search results.

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

#110

Post by whimsicalism »

willio58 wrote: post #106
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…

I think what's happening with Twitter and Reddit is actually a good thing in that it's exposing the failures of centralized networks. The thing is, these failures aren't big enough yet for people to jump ship and I think the main problem is none of the decentralized social networks have provided a solution that's better. Mastodon is theoretically a better version of Twitter, but normal people get lost the moment some…

also, do search engines even index mastodon? i've never seen a mastodon result in my life, compared to reddit.
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