Reddit can't build a better search engine • Hacker News Board

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#201

Post by api » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:10 PM UTC

Kagi is the search engine I'm most excited about. I'm using it as my default now and will pay when it exits beta.

The placement of financial incentive at the user should help them invest in combatting spam and returning good results. The results are already pretty solid.

Money easily creates perverse incentives in media. The advertising driven model is the easiest to scale. You lose the friction of signups and people don't want to pay anyway. They'll happily blow $50/month at Starbucks but $10/month for media is too much. Unfortunately the advertising model places the incentive around capturing user attention rather than delivering anything useful, so it incentivizes the media equivalent of empty carbs and sugar.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#202

Post by alkonaut » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:11 PM UTC

bjarneh wrote: post #187

> 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 th…

The early search engines (Webcrawler, Lycos, ...) ranked "relevance" based on some silly metric like "the more times the search term appears on the page, the more relevant the page must be".

So the result was that the first pages were full spam sites that just used search terms as hidden text. Then Altavista came and it was a huge change for the better. They at least made some effort of trying to rank actual relevance. Of course, Page/Brin's invention that made Google what it is today is PageRank, and none of the competition were close to an idea that good.

So PageRank'ed pages, good spam detection filters and ads on the side = Good Google. A search engine that stood out against the competition.

Now Googlee has horrible site spam detection, shows ads in the main result list (some times it's all you see). Google now has very little edge against the competition. Even just 1-2 years ago DDG and Bing were a lot worse than even the modern day Google. But what should make the search people at google really sweat isn't so much that google has deteriorated a bit, but that Bing and DDG have improved so much that they are now on Par. Google search has never had peers at any point since it was launched.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#203

Post by never_a-pickle » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:12 PM UTC

Reddit results are not organic at all but maybe appears to be on the surface.

Subs have their own "reddit" brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda.

I already did my own informal research on this - reddit has transitioned into consumption. I went sub by sub for thousands of posts, even a few years ago, and found that at least 75% of the selection of hobby subs I chose were related to the consumption of products within that hobby, not the active participation and knowledge translation within that hobby. You'd think camping subs would be talking about camping? Sure, see the sidebar for basic info. However, what you'll really see is 80 of the top 100 posts of the day will be pictures of various products within different backgrounds/settings.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#204

Post by otherotherchris » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #161

Traster wrote: post #159

I completely disagree with some of the points here. There seems to be this weird assumption from people that Reddit is some organic source of information that hasn't been polluted by advertisers and SEO. But the truth is that it absolutely has, the difference is that the way you game the system is different. Google is this crazy algorithm and no one really knows how it works, so people just throw shit at it. Keyword…

> What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized. So it's just like the rest of the Internet. And at least in Reddit (or, more to the point, the newer federated lookalikes - Reddit is dying and losing its highest value and most committed users) you can go look for the tiny niche communities focused around that interest, where users will be better focused on policing in…

They don't exist. Open forums have been dying for the last decade. First they migrated to Reddit, then walled garden Facebook groups, and lately to Discord.

Google has also removed a lot of large and active forums from it's index outright, either due to AI bungling of it's core product, anti-competitive reasons, or political conspiracy.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#205

Post by kvetching » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:16 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#206

Post by quixoticaxolotl » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

I've searched for Reddit in the past because Reddit is the only site where I can get community answers to an important question. In those cases, the community aspect mattered to me - for example, I recently moved to Boston, so I solicited Bostonian's recommendations from r/boston; my partner and I were having troubles, and I wanted to hear from people who'd gone through similar experiences; I wanted to learn about compiler construction and went looking for other smart folks who were interested in the same topic.

I would never do a code search on Reddit. I would never search for "restaurants near me" on Reddit. I would almost certainly never solicit medical advice from Reddit, or type in a new term I'd heard to get all the information about it, or try to shop for things from Reddit links. I just don't think that's what Reddit's for.

That's why I find both this response and the original so bizarre in their thesis. Search isn't homogeneous, and, while I have noticed declining quality in a few areas I search frequently, those areas almost never overlap with my Reddit-specific search areas. Reddit wouldn't replace my Google any time soon, even if it built a better search engine.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#207

Post by thrwyoilarticle » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:17 PM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #165

onion2k wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that's not my problem. "How do you satisfy your customer's needs while making a profit" is the same problem every other business has. It's up to the content creators to solve it. If they can't, then they go out of business. It's that simple. If you can't make a profit from your content because you're giving it away with blockable ads then you should stop doing that and do something else. If I went to a Ferr…

> It's up to the content creators to solve it. If they can't, then they go out of business. It's that simple. They are solving it, over and over, for the past 20 years. The way so far is to find new ways to shove ads down enough peoples throats. And the internet can't stop complaining about them doing so, understandably. > Honestly, that's not my problem. So, yeah, maybe it kinda is. A state of war is mostly a lose-l…

That's a misrepresentation of what's happening. They've largely not tried to solve the adblock 'problem' because users are in the minority. And yet, despite that, they've still ramped up adverts. They're always going to advertise the maximum account they can before it hinders returns - that's economics.

So I could argue that by using blockers I'm reducing the amount of advertising the populace will take and increasing the value of a given, lower level of advertising.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#208

Post by devit » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

ceres wrote: post #81

bjt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever searched for a recipe in Google? Have you noticed that the top results always go on for a few pages of SEO-optimized storytelling and explanation before you actually see the recipe? I'm sure someone at Google has. They could fix it if they wanted to, and boost well-known sites that get straight to the recipe (allrecipes.com, foodnetwork.com) instead of making you scroll through the SEO spam first. They…

I used to think this too but if all the recipe websites start going straight to the recipe without the the personalization, then how would you rank them? Remember, there are thousands of these websites while there are only so many ways you can boil an egg, for example.

PageRank-like system, ideally based on real identities? (i.e. depending on how often the recipe is linked from Facebook, etc.)

Also if you are specifically doing it for recipes, just select manually websites that have precise ingredient amounts, very detailed and explicit recipes, that explain the reasoning behind each step, provide photos of how things should and shouldn't look like, why the proposed technique is optimal and/or the tradeoff of alternative techniques, the chemistry involved, comparison with other recipes, etc. (although in my experience most or all recipe sites are horrible and aren't even vaguely close to something like this)

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#209

Post by kvetching » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:20 PM UTC

bjarneh wrote: post #187

> 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 th…

No post body was provided.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#210

Post by valar_m » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 1:25 PM UTC

never_a-pickle wrote: post #203

Reddit results are not organic at all but maybe appears to be on the surface. Subs have their own "reddit" brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda. I already did my own informal research on this - reddit has transitioned into consumption. I went sub by sub for thousands of posts, even a few years ago, a…

> Subs have their own "reddit" brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own "reddit" opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda.

Which is actually the cool thing about Reddit, because you can just create your own subreddit about a topic and set the rules as you see fit. Don't like that camping pics have products in the background? Alright, set a rule for your new sub that says no products in pics, and then rule your kingdom with an iron fist.

Heck, that could be the whole point of your sub. /r/campingProductFree or something.