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Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

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Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#161

Post by u8080 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #84
kjkjadksj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the issue is that it isn’t just the web, but the inevitable american corporate shareholder model. Even businesses could be mom and pop ified and made way more popular overnight: quit raising prices and cutting corners and it would actually stand for itself like a massive $7 burrito. However the expectation is that shareholders get returns. Costs must be cut. Prices must be raised. Margins must be improved. It…

My rant above and your response reminded me of all those tons of MMO games out there that are ancient, with a tiny playerbase, that remain profitable nonetheless simply because if you have a product that people like using, putting it into maintenance mode and doing the bare minimum to keep it running is a perfectly valid business strategy. The companies that buy these service games and run them effectively just buy c…

Yeah, like Rockstar with GTA V Online.

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#162

Post by alephxyz »

wuiheerfoj wrote: post #132
jasode wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But, apparently, they did finally find a way to make money. The most recent 10-K financial results 2024-03-31 (filed 2024-05-08) shows they actually lost money: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1713445 (For 2024-Q1, Reddit lost -$575 million on revenue of $242 M.) If the quoted "$60 million deal" [1] from Feb 2024 is accurate, that small amount from Google may not be enough for Reddit to turn a profit. It remai…

Wow, perhaps I’m naive but what the hell are they spending over $800M a year on? That seems an obscene amount for a glorified message board. I just read they have 2000 employees which is also puzzling to me

They spent 400M on R&D this quarter, which means more "personalisation"/ad targeting and probably cooking up some DOA chatbot/assistant product that's costing them a ton in compute

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#163

Post by splwjs »

stainablesteel wrote: post #141
VoidWhisperer wrote: post #2

Wow, reddit found a way to make themselves even less useful somehow. After the API fiasco, that seemed like it'd be pretty hard to do.

which is ironic because pre-AI every solid piece of obscure information and non-programming question usually had an answer on reddit, its an extremely valuable dataset looking back. but moving forward i think its only going to become less valuable and people will probably manually/custom-scrape all the questions out of worthwhile subreddits and open up their data for free

When I was young, my brother knew a guy who was really into movies. If you wanted to know about a movie you couldn't remember, you would go talk to that guy.

For a while, the internet had an end-run play that made that guy less useful. You can just go on the internet for obscure movie information, buddy.

But now it seems like knowing a movie guy is going to be the only way to get a real person's opinion on movies. The internet is about to forget everything without a profit motive and just start telling you that the latest product from a monolith corp like disney is the only movie worth watching. If someone scrapes all the useful movie opinions off of reddit and spends their time crafting it into a usable format, that guy's probably got a company. But not Bill. Bill's just a guy you can know or not know. You can't monetize knowing Bill. Sidenote that's probably why it irked me so bad when some bozo coined the phrase "social capital".

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#164

Post by StrauXX »

IANAL but as far as I understand the current legal status (in the US) a change in robots.txt or terms and conditions is not binding for web scrapers since the data is publicly accessible. Neither does displaying a banner "By using this site you accept our terms and conditions" change anything about that. The only thing that can make these kinds of terms binding is if the data is only accessible after proactively accepting terms. For instance by restricting the website until one has created an account. Linkedin lost a case against a startup scraping and indexing their data because of that a few years ago.

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#165

Post by MichaelZuo »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #129
ColinHayhurst wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi uses at least Google and Mojeek edit: > Realistically, there are only 2 search engines now. https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

> Realistically, there are only 2 search engines now. From the article: Many alternatives to GBY [Google, Bing, and Yandex] exist, but almost none of them have their own results; This seems to assert that ~0 other search providers do any crawling at all. Ever. Are we sure that's the case? (they could crawl but never ever return those results == more odd).

Bing provides far fewer verbatim results for pretty much all search queries that I've tested.

And Yandex isn't much better for non cyrillic search, Baidu is only for the Chinese web effectively.

And all other search engines either don't even attempt to do full web crawls anymore and/or buy from one of the four above.

So realistically there's just one search engine for the full web that actually does the work.

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#166

Post by numbers »

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations." - Aaron Swartz (2008)

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#167

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

ColinHayhurst wrote: post #140
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Realistically, there are only 2 search engines now. From the article: Many alternatives to GBY [Google, Bing, and Yandex] exist, but almost none of them have their own results; This seems to assert that ~0 other search providers do any crawling at all. Ever. Are we sure that's the case? (they could crawl but never ever return those results == more odd).

It's a very long article so understandable that you did not read on and learn about other search engines crawling beyond GBY. Still there are indeed very few that are crawling at web scale, and internationally. We are at 8 billion pages and totally independent [0], hence expressing our concerns to 404 media after being blanked by Reddit. [0] https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek

> did not read on and learn about other search engines crawling beyond GBY. Still there are indeed very few that are crawling at web scale, and internationally

That's helpful clarification.

In criticism of the article, you might agree that

none of them have their own results

is a fairly absolute statement. It signals: Final word on the matter; no nuance to follow.

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#168

Post by rkangel »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #31

This is great. It means I won't see Reddit content popping up all over search results in other engines. Can Medium do the same? And perhaps Quora?

Interesting. I have long found Reddit to be the an excellent source of solutions to problems. Stack Overflow usually beats it for programming specific stuff, but for everything else usually the most helpful answer comes from Reddit. It's a real person, helping another real person with a real problem.

Re: Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal

#169

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #165
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Realistically, there are only 2 search engines now. From the article: Many alternatives to GBY [Google, Bing, and Yandex] exist, but almost none of them have their own results; This seems to assert that ~0 other search providers do any crawling at all. Ever. Are we sure that's the case? (they could crawl but never ever return those results == more odd).

Bing provides far fewer verbatim results for pretty much all search queries that I've tested. And Yandex isn't much better for non cyrillic search, Baidu is only for the Chinese web effectively. And all other search engines either don't even attempt to do full web crawls anymore and/or buy from one of the four above. So realistically there's just one search engine for the full web that actually does the work.

> And Yandex isn't much better for non cyrillic search,

I like Yandex when I'm rabbit-holing after obscure musicians/music. I routinely have a better experience than I do with DDG or Kagi or Goog.

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