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Reddit is taking over Google

businessinsider.com

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Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#21

Post by UberFly »

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.…

Good take and I agree totally. I visit reddit daily and avoid the front page like the plague. I'm sure I miss a lot of interesting stuff but the time-killing rabbit holes and concentrated venomous vitriol I don't miss.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#22

Post by Terr_ »

For your amusement, a relevant music-video titled "The current state of search engines" [0]

    Yes, I know about the quotes
    I know about the dash and OR
    It's all ass
    Google doesn't work... Anymore

    I have to add the word "Reddit" 
    To every goddamn search to read 
    Content made by humans
    Google doesn't work... Anymore
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#23

Post by IshKebab »

xcrunner529 wrote: post #13
chomp wrote: post #8

> Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they "proactively seek it out." Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here. People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s…

Yep. Google is mostly useless these days aside from a Reddit search because everything is fake.

It's fine for things that people don't have a commercial interest in manipulating. But yeah for buying mainstream products (laptops, TVs, hoovers etc.) it's completely useless. Even Amazon reviews are better (at least in the UK; I understand they may be worse in America).

Tbh I would not be surprised if spammers start posting LLM generated comments with affiliate links on Reddit. Maybe they already do.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#24

Post by sylens »

chomp wrote: post #8

> Responding to a post on X, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said users not only like seeing "forum content" but that they "proactively seek it out." Nothing cures my imposter syndrome more than seeing so many Google employees completely fail to understand what is happening here. People aren’t tacking Reddit to queries because they particularly like Reddit or because they want to see user generated content, it’s…

Spot on. I seek out the Reddit result because it is the only valuable one left.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#27

Post by LorenDB »

I'm not sure why you would promote Quora in search results. They lock non-members out after viewing just one or two answers, and the content on Quora is generally viewed as worse than Reddit (not that Reddit is particularly great...).

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#28

Post by SteveNuts »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #15

The only problem is bad advice that can come up quite often on Reddit. There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively. Otherwise, Reddit is great for technical stuff and niche community communication.

> There are various subreddits where young people ask for advice and other young people with no experience are giving advice that might influence others negatively.

I've yet to see a relationships advice thread where the top comment isn't "get divorced immediately"

Which is scary, because these people are taking OP's comment at face value and only hearing one side of the story.

Re: Reddit is taking over Google

#29

Post by jedberg »

To this day, my most public contribution to reddit is that I wrote the code to put the title of the post in the URL. That was done specifically for SEO purposes.

It was pretty much the only SEO optimization we ever did (along with a few DOM changes), because shortly after that, Google basically dedicated engineering effort specifically to crawling reddit. So much so that we lost the "crawl rate" button in our SEO admin page on Google, it was just set to "Custom".

I had to stand up a fleet of app servers and caches and databases, and change the load balancers so that Google basically had their own infrastructure (although we would shunt all crawlers there). Crawler traffic was very different than regular traffic -- it looked at pages more than two days old, something humans rarely did at the time. It would blow out every cache (memory, database, disk, etc.). So we put them on their own infra to keep them from killing the rest of the site.

And now I will hang an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.

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