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Reddit is taking over Google

businessinsider.com

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#131

Post by xhevahir »

piafraus wrote: post #84
haunter wrote: post #16

I still prefer reddit most of the time. Front page (default) subs are highly manipulated (especially anything news, politics, current things etc.) but for hobbies, video games, and sports it's still the best site. Video game discusssions especially because unlike Discord every tip, guide, and walkthrough is archived and searchable. And for sports mostly because it's _insane_ how quickly you get highlights and videos.…

> I can't ready my city's sub because it's always the same tired politics posts instead of "what are some good restaurants" or "here is a photo of a building I've never seen before". I find it funny, that I am completely opposite. I would very much prefer the local news/politics/crime, as this directly affects me and my life - e.g. don't go to the highway today, because protestors block it. Vs. the boring similar pho…

That's probably not the kind of political post OP is talking about. They probably mean ones like "Mayor Quimby continues his war on the unhoused," or "City council are determined to drive out small business."

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#132

Post by sct202 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #126

Somehow Reddit has avoided being overrun by bot/affiliate spam and has become a better source of certain types of information. I don't know how. Perhaps some combination of the voting system (effectively outsourcing getting rid of junk) and algorithms. I'm building a photo booth and an example from today: if I search Google for the best budget PC with discrete graphics cards, everything other than the Reddit link is…

The legions of unpaid mods manually reviewing user comments and posts are such an advantage. A lot of people attempt to run their own shill subreddits but they end up being such poor quality and isolated that no one goes to them and they're basically invisible. I feel like one of the reasons reddit search is so bad, is that you actually get exposed to all the low quality subs that way whereas Google just ignores unpopular subs.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#133

Post by bogtog »

rifty wrote: post #112

The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic. Because Reddit has horrible search, the best way to search Reddit content is actually using Google's indexing instead. Every time the Google algorithm feeds Reddit, it's feeding itself with more '...reddit' queries. Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too different to the ro…

> Because Reddit has horrible search

Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#134

Post by dylan604 »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #124
mark242 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mind-boggling to me that Google didn't create a spec to work with special partners whereby they could get syndicated data in a format that was easy to ingest, and easy for their partners to produce. Lighting dollars on fire just to serve up pages to Googlebot, when you could just periodically dump a journal of updates to Google, is just crazy imo. On edit: if only there were some way to do some kind of really si…

Also, isn't this illegal? Either Google respected rate limits (which I doubt) or it was a form of a DDoS attack.

It's only illegal if you poor people do it. For us rich corporations, we do what we want

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#135

Post by deskr »

No wonder. I was reading a about historical battles the other day and wanted to research the armour that the knights whore. When I searched for "knight armour" (I didn't know "plate armour" is the generic term), ONE result was wikipedia. ALL the others were trying to sell me knight armour.

Really Google?

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#136

Post by skilled »

Google released an updated called the Helpful Content Update[0] in Sep 2023 that decimated tens of thousands of sites, many of which were extremely prominent for general queries. Glenn Gabe[1] has been tracking 400~ sites since then (those that were impacted), and Google has refused to lift the classifier. That's 7 months of no updates or guidance from Google, and sites like Reddit have tripled their traffic. The same goes for LinkedIn and Quora.

This article[2] also highlights Google defending the stance, even though this LinkedIn post[3] shows that there are issues with this. Google literally made Reddit the number one site for _all_ queries with no regard for other creators.

They might as well delete their entire search engine and simply act as the front-end of Reddit's search, which everyone knows is completely dogshit.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/08/helpful-co...

[1]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1780563588756676890

[2]: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-defends-statements-searc...

[3]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:71838511...

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#137

Post by itslennysfault »

Whats really odd is I've noticed the exact opposite. I used to always get Reddit results on the first page for any random search I did, and the past year-ish I've found myself needing to add `site:reddit.com` to searches if I want to see Reddit results more and more often. I pretty much never see Reddit results without it.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#138

Post by bogtog »

adamomada wrote: post #89
Klonoar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I describe Reddit to people is that you have zero clue if you’re arguing with a 13 year old who discovered $x concept this week. (Or a bot) If you move through the site with that understanding - and personally, using the old interface - it can still be bearable. I’m not the biggest fan of the company itself these days and I hold out hope that something else can take off, but I’ve not been impressed so far.

I have a theory that reddit was pretty decent when it first started because the majority of the site users were at least university or college students/age. Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably trending to grade school These are the people who are influencing the Google search user at large now. We’re fucked

> Nowadays the average age is high school, and probably trending to grade school

Have you ever seen one of the site surveys that subreddits typically do? The median age is almost always above college graduation (22 years old), at least for the subs I frequent. I could see the front page subs having a median in college age (18-22), but I'd be really surprised if it was below 18.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#139

Post by _8j50 »

Reddit doesn't allow vpns or or cloud/hosted ips and unlike google, when it censors you, you lose data plus their horrible clinky ui and "please install our spyware app if you want our artificial ui slowdowns to go away" b.s.. i don't know why so many people think this is a good thing. It might as well be facebook or twitter.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#140

Post by mike50 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #126

Somehow Reddit has avoided being overrun by bot/affiliate spam and has become a better source of certain types of information. I don't know how. Perhaps some combination of the voting system (effectively outsourcing getting rid of junk) and algorithms. I'm building a photo booth and an example from today: if I search Google for the best budget PC with discrete graphics cards, everything other than the Reddit link is…

I beg to differ look at the amount of conde nast reposts, posts that just link to Wikipedia and posts that are repated over and over.
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