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Reddit can't build a better search engine

ruky.me

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Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#243

Post by Bilal_io »

ddtaylor wrote: post #57
notRobot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you guys add a flat monthly/one-time usage fee?

Accepting payment for this kind of service is actually quite problematic. Even more so now that the vast majority of the userbase is Only Fans creators. I'm not saying it should be like that, but if you've ever tried to accept payments for anything "high risk" it's a nightmare. For example, Stripe won't allow any of it at all. It's blacklisted in multiple ways through their restricted services.

Isn't it high risk when consumers are paying for online porn? I don't see how the creators would be high risk.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#244

Post by esyir »

afiori wrote: post #168
Decabytes wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favorite content creators. Sure you bought an LTT water bottle, but make no mistake Google is a business, YouTube is a business and they are not providing these videos out of the goodness of their heart. If YouTube ever doesn't make sense (algorithmically, financially, or through whatever metric Google decides is important) Google wi…

Personally I don't feel a moral dilemma about not giving revenue to YouTube. That said, if Person A buys an LTT water bottle and block all ads and Person B watches all ads and never buys anything, then Person B needs to watch thousands of ads to make up the same revenue from that single merchandise purchase. I agree with Linus that skipping ads is piracy, but if you finance it in better ways should you care? For refe…

That was basically his stance. It's piracy, and I see no issues with it.

I'm not sure why people got absolutely butthurt about that.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#245

Post by costcofries »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #206

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 co…

From the article, "The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue."

You know who shares valuable knowledge? Other humans who have personally experienced the knowledge I'm trying to acquire. In this context, Reddit IS the website that shares REAL knowledge. I agree I wouldn't search "restaurants near me" on reddit but what I do search locally, and every single time I visit a new city is, "favorite restaurants in city x". The result is real crowd-voted feedback, from real humans that has almost always been extremely reliable, google doesn't do this, effectively.

Another example. I was trying to buy new skis. Google any query and you get SEO'd results which are almost always useless or sponsored reviews/content. Now, try reddit, you get real testimonials from people who have actually used the product and often provide insights I wasn't originally even aware i should be considering.

The reddit dataset is already a search engine, it just doesn't have a pretty UI. It's like trying to buy Gucci shoes at Nordstrom Rack vs. the Gucci store.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#246

Post by pr0zac »

jrussbowman wrote: post #220

I built https://www.unscatter.com using Reddit to source links for the search index. Last year I added Twitter as another source. I don't think it's a "better" search engine. It's a different lens through which to search. Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about. This is why I limit my index to articles that have popped in my Reddit/Twitter input in the last 30 days, deleting any…

This is pretty cool but am wondering, how are you choosing which subreddits/tweets are indexed?

I notice for instance "manga updates" is in the word cloud but a search for "kanye west" doesn't return any relevant results despite him being in the news a bunch lately for being kind of nuts.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#247

Post by foxfluff »

alkonaut wrote: post #202
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 relevanc…

> 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.

I'd say it's both, but the force that has been driving me to use DDG more and more recently is not that it's gotten so much better but that G has gotten so much worse.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#248

Post by nivethan »

jrussbowman wrote: post #231
nivethan wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool site! Is there a way to get the words in a list instead of a cloud? I am interested in what your thoughts are about being in an echo chamber and getting out of it, but this is a great way to get a high level view of whats happening on reddit.

Right now the terms are available only via the word cloud. I have considered trying to put together an api and also keeping more metrics about each link. For example how many times it's popped up, reddit and twitter users that posted it and which subreddits the post is in. I just haven't gotten around to it. The concern of it being an echo chamber is one of the major reasons I added Twitter and I still look for more…

> I question if it's really reflective of what the world is talking about.

I'm very curious what each country is talking about. I made a little script that would show me what each country's subreddit was talking about but, the fact that it is on reddit means that its already biased. Maybe something where you use the the most popular source inside a country would be a way out of the echo chamber but the work in maintaining that I imagine might be a bit much.

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