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

Reddit can't build a better search engine

ruky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 289 posts

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#181

Post by toto444 »

halotrope wrote: post #88

Despite all of its drawbacks like the obnoxious mobile app pushing and deterioration of communities after they pass a certain size it is still the closest equivalent I know of for the early 2000's forum culture. It is the only social network I know (apart from HN) that does not exclusively deals in bite-sized dopamine hits. Lets hope that the upcoming IPO does not compromise the incentives there.

There are a lot of dynamic forums out there. Enough for a company (Discourse) to have powering them as their business model.

I tend to navigate very niche spaces and I stumble upon forums on a regular basis.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#182

Post by vogre »

csee wrote: post #118
mrep wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you do you but when I search flight I for one am looking to purchase a flight. If I want NASA links or the Museum of Flight I would specify that.

Alternatively, I could have searched for "flight comparisons" or "US airlines" back in 2002 if that's the type of result that I actually wanted. The problem is that there is no way I can tell current Google to give me stuff that's interesting, novel and information dense anymore. It's all well and good if I knew that the Museum of Flight existed before my search, but the point of Google is to tell me about its existe…

It's not possible because the demand for this is very low and implementation cost is extremely high. No one will pay for that.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#184

Post by marginalia_nu »

bullen wrote: post #177
marginalia_nu wrote: post #175

I think people give too SEO too much credit. SEO is a big problem as long as there is only one big search engine, with one algorithm. That allows absurd specialization to abuse the idiosyncrasies of that search engine. That's just how it goes with monocultures though. I've had very little problem identifying SEO spam by just not being Google and promoting other values than they do. Since the search engine spammers ar…

I think Google is over because the problems we have now are harder and harder to google. That combined with stagnation of constructive and/or simple progress, all caused by lack of energy. Means there is less and less you don't know that Google can teach you. I haven't googled anything important since around 2016. Reddit gives you a narrow subject with people that care about said subject, much much better!

Well there still seems to be a lot of deep content on the web, it's just that google doesn't show you any of it. You may, if you're lucky, get a Wikipedia box. And Wikipedia, for all its breadth, is incredibly shallow on most topics.

I submit that the reason you aren't learning anything from google is that it just doesn't surface anything for you to learn from, but usually just the same dozen or so big sites, wikipedia, stackoverflow, etc, and the rest is all spam and ads.

If you google "Strongly Connected Components", it shows you a wikipedia page and a few pages with what looks like freebooted content and a bunch of ads.

This is a far better resource than any you'll find on Google:

https://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Algorithms/MyAlgorit...

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#185

Post by nicoburns »

conjecTech wrote: post #34

This thesis is off. It's not as if Reddit just appeared on the internet yesterday. It's been a place people look for this kind of info for a long time, and people have been trying to game it for just as long. And it already has a good search engine - that just happens to be Google. So it still leaves the question: why does Reddit still have such a high signal-to-noise ratio. A few things I've noticed: 1. A lot of con…

Don't forget:

0. Unlike the majority of the web, Reddit is moderated by actual humans.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#186

Post by ThinkBeat »

A lot of "influencers" get paid good money to shill on Reddit.

It has a huge social media site. Of course, it is not ignored by the industry. Products, fads and politics.

Over the last several years it has become quite infested.

All is not lost.

There are some really good smaller subreddits. For smaller subreddits who have been around for a long time social meia influencers are easier to spot.

Some subreddits are so focused on an obscure niche that it is not worth money to try.

Well paid reddit influencers are well trained in "propaganda". One might have several accounts and the information comes "organic" from a "group effort". Some will not even name a product directly but give enough hints.

You also have negative influencers that work had to hurt the credibility of others and brand.

>Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#187

Post by bjarneh »

> I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results.

I'm old enough to remember when Google came, and the main difference was this:

With Google you did not have to flip through 3 pages of completely unrelated search results; that were paid for. Google used to display advertisements on the right as well, i.e. not among the regular search results.

This made Google so much better (and more popular) then their competition.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#188

Post by ppod »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #186

A lot of "influencers" get paid good money to shill on Reddit. It has a huge social media site. Of course, it is not ignored by the industry. Products, fads and politics. Over the last several years it has become quite infested. All is not lost. There are some really good smaller subreddits. For smaller subreddits who have been around for a long time social meia influencers are easier to spot. Some subreddits are so…

The structure of reddit really works well for preventing shilling from being a fatal problem. Namespaces moderated by genuine enthsuasists gain more users, and even if they are infiltrated, there is this constant evaluation of subreddits and posts by subscriber numbers and upvotes. It's a darwinian ecosystem with constant speciation and competition among subreddits.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#189

Post by chaxor »

Nowado wrote: post #26

Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It will get figured out. I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing…

What about stackoverflow?

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#190

Post by danuker »

notRobot wrote: post #19

Reddit doesn't really need to build a search engine, they could just have an algolia instance like HN does: https://hn.algolia.com/ . While not perfect, it does a pretty good job, in my experience. However, the article makes a valid point -- the moment people start using it heavily, we'll get a reddit comment equivalent of SEO, with keyword stuffing and whatnot.

I absolutely love the HN Algolia search. I am amazed by its sheer speed, and that it does exactly what you'd expect, lets you sort by popularity and filter by time, and does no neural-network-deep-learning-garbage query rewriting.

I'm thankful for its existence, and I hope they get plenty of clients due to this HN demo of their power.

I hope they can afford to keep it alive forever. I use it instead of the " reddit" suffix in Google, usually HN has what I'm interested in, and in any case has much higher signal-to-noise ratio.

Post reply on HN