Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#111

Post by iLoveOncall »

sshine wrote: post #105
iLoveOncall wrote: post #65

Blame the Reddit moderators taking a unilateral decision for sham reasons.

Can you clarify what the sham reasons are?

Moderations tools (Reddit has stated many times that they would retain free access to the API), blind users not being able to use the official clients (they are accessible beside very few actions that are only used by mods, easy to fix and commitment has been made on those), and porn being removed from the API (porn in the 3rd party apps is the hill people wanna die on?).

This protest has been fabricated by the multi-millionaire 3rd party apps developers that want to keep the free money flowing.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#112

Post by layer8 »

jraph wrote: post #97
faangsticle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't google used to show a link to their cached version for every result?

They definitely did. I don't know if it's still there, maybe in some (hamburger) menu attached to the results, if any? In any case I think their cache is still readable, but their googlebot is fast and may be quick to get rid of the cache if a page disappears… Recently, I've had bad luck with search engine caches when trying to read a page that does not exist anymore.

It’s there in the three-dots menu in desktop view.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#113

Post by bombcar »

moneywoes wrote: post #86
asdff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google loves to group results by domain too. Say you search for something related to your hobby. Somewhere on the page is going to be a hit from the forum for that hobby, but just below it in a smaller font will be like a half dozen sub hits from that same domain, then that's all there is for that domain in the search results. Never mind that all the relevant knowledge online on this something might be contained in t…

Doesn’t it depend on the domain authority of the back links? Sites like Reddit are no follow so I don’t understand why a bot reposting links there would bolster its ranking

My theory is that google ignores nofollow at its own discretion.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#114

Post by boomboomsubban »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #76
boomboomsubban wrote: post #61

Duckduckgo has somewhat recently added a feature where with some searches they'll spot you're trying to search for Reddit posts, and ask if you want more of them displayed. It's a useful addition for the habit I've picked up of adding "reddit" to searches to limit the blog spam. It's a shame it came out now, when reddit is increasingly full of spam and now is blowing itself up.

It's funny, I've seen spam sites in my web crawls that append have 'reddit' appended to the page title. I've never seen such search results appear in any search results, but points for effort.

Both DDG and Google have some default rules to limit the number of results from one domain. So those clear spam attempts may not make it, but I've seen many sites that include something like "this item is popular on Reddit for x reason, but they don't pay us so it's actually not that great."

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#115

Post by layer8 »

neovialogistics wrote: post #9
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #4

It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become. For so many cases Google actually is only useful as a search interface for Reddit, StackOverflow, and other sites that accumulate (and actually garbage collect) knowledge. Without such a qualifier Google will just give you absolute SEO trash results for many types of searches.

I'd love the following combination: * A search engine that only crawls and searches a whitelist of sites. * Community functionality to vote on the contents of the whitelist.

> * Community functionality to vote on the contents of the whitelist.

This would become a community of mostly SEO spammers very fast.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#116

Post by pkamb »

2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #4

It's really disturbing just how bad Google search has become. For so many cases Google actually is only useful as a search interface for Reddit, StackOverflow, and other sites that accumulate (and actually garbage collect) knowledge. Without such a qualifier Google will just give you absolute SEO trash results for many types of searches.

I would love a competing SERP that simply listed the results on Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. Have a major section of the page that ALWAYS lists the Wikipedia result. Don't make me add "reddit" to every search term.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#117

Post by addandsubtract »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #80
mr_00ff00 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am missing something about IPOs here, but if Reddit’s valuation is way off because it was before the correction, wouldn’t it be easy to argue your low ball offer is the real value? Even if they IPO, wouldn’t the stock immediately crash if it’s overvalued?

> Even if they IPO, wouldn’t the stock immediately crash if it’s overvalued? Yes, this is effectively guaranteed at this point. The hope of the investors is presumably that they will be able to sell fast and early.

To whom though? Not even WSB will be touching those shares.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#119

Post by FireSquirrel »

duringmath wrote: post #60

Any specific examples you can share? I haven't experienced any decline in quality so maybe I'm not searching for the right things. It makes sense that when a bunch of content goes dark it would have an impact so a few specific examples would be appreciated.

Look up anything involving computer hardware, all the pcmasterrace/PC uilder/etc subs were locked so only a few sentences showed on search.

Was miserable when folks referenced a thread and couldn't get to it lol.

Re: Tell HN: Google search sucks even more during Reddit blackout

#120

Post by machdiamonds »

Ironically, LLMs could be a game-changer in dealing with SEO noise, not at the search stage, but during the indexing of web pages. By understanding context and semantics, they could help create a more refined and relevant index, effectively cutting through the clutter of SEO-optimized content.
Post reply on HN