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Reddit can't build a better search engine

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Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#281

Post by MaxBarraclough »

> once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites.

reddit already has a search feature. It's garbage, but it does exist.

Also, plenty of people already use Google to search reddit. If reddit integrated a Google-powered search feature, would that be a game-changer? I doubt it. What would be the difference compared to if they implemented their own search?

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#282

Post by afiori »

esyir wrote: post #244
afiori wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Linus point has a slightly different nuance: adblocking is theft. Similarly to how Taylor Swift was against Spotify because (IIRC) people should buy albums.

My version was that adblocking damages revenue in very quantifiable ways* and you can work around that.

* I am almost sure that YouTube's recommendation algorithm does not counts watched ads as a metric, that is maybe watching ads increases the total watch-time of the video but otherwise an ad-full view is counted the same as a ad-free view. But this belief is not based on anything.

If this happened to be wrong then an adblocker could exponentially hurt a channel growth and that might equal quite a few water bottles.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#283

Post by jrussbowman »

jrussbowman wrote: post #258
pr0zac wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get the top 100 posts from the top 100 popular subreddits for the past hour (as defined by reddit). I then do some basic filtering on subreddits to exclude a few that are often in the top that I find are either mostly text or media content, I'm looking for links. The lack of Kanye West content is interesting. I'm going to try to find some time this weekend to dive into that. The only thing I can think of is it's so…

So if anyone is following this, right now it appears that not many Kanye stories are bubbling to the top. It's simply not in the top 100 of the top 100. For the full 30 day index, checking just on Kanye in story titles, this is all I have in my index.

Kanye West - Gold Digger Kanye wants Billie Eilish to say sorry or he'll pull out of Coachella Kanye West: ‘Stop Asking Me to Do NFTs... Ask Me Later’ Kanye West Does Not Want to Get Involved With NFTs Kanye West Rejects NFTs, Tells Fans To Stop Asking: 'I Make Music In The Real World'

So long story short, I think I may need to consider increasing my pull. Going from the top 100 of the top 100 to maybe the top 1000 of the top 100 or the top 100 of the top 1000. I'll have to do some research and also validate my crawl can support it.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#284

Post by LanternLight83 »

skydhash wrote: post #254
ringworld wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like my Anker Bluetooth speaker, it's an old one that just keeps on working, lasted longer than Android phones. Listening to it now, every morning - the Anker love is real. ;)

If you need something cheap that lasts, Anker is your best bet. There are others that have longer lifetime, but they are from Sony, Bose or JBL and thus more expensive. My sister has the Soundcore for 2 years now.

Have had mine for several, don't use it as much as I used to because I prefer the sound signature of my phone speaker for spoken content but still love it for music. Reccomended it to my extended family and still get thrown for a loop when I see them using it all the time, like a piece of my home in their's.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#286

Post by Anunayj »

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…

> try to shop for things from Reddit

Any reasons why, I often check reddit for reviews for thing I plan to buy.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#287

Post by gambler »

dicefordeath wrote: post #255
gambler wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about. It's a source of information for what Reddit and Twitter owners want you to see. Both websites are heavily manipulated in a myriad of ways. (The simplest one is via massive amounts of accounts banned for wrongthink.) This is blatantly obvious if instead of passively absorbing news you deep-dive into a specific issue and then look up the…

What are some examples of this extreme and blatantly obvious manipulation? Certainly it happens but you're making it sound like we live in the Truman Show.

Here is a simple one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/se7t5p/i_saw_the_t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/secvqz/i_stood_...

A subreddit with 480K users manages to upvote the topic 1.3K times with 78% up ratio. A subreddit with 1.7 million users upvotes a similarly themed topic (expressing a different opinion) only to get it 555 points with 91% up ratio. Ten times the difference in engagement.

This is the norm. Reddit bans the fuck out of people with opinions that don't align with the hivemind. You can search HN for "reddit banned" and see a limitless supply of stories. At one point they deleted two thousand subreddits in one go.

I'm not going into certain topics magically not appearing anywhere on Reddit, because it would require a significantly more detailed examples, but it's a thing as well. It is the Truman Show for public opinion.

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#288

Post by genewitch »

ksec wrote: post #236
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…

> the community aspect mattered to me That is why Google was worried about Social Media / Facebook eating them, and hence the creation of Google+. When most of the important, or valuable answer are on the social network, search engine will cease to be the entry point of internet. And in many countries, Facebook and Whatsapp really is "the" Internet. And after that there seems to be a gentleman agreement, Zuckerberg w…

I'm sure this is the reason given as to why facebook's search function is barely better than grep + line noise...

Re: Reddit can't build a better search engine

#289

Post by KnobbleMcKnees »

ravenstine wrote: post #221
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…

Reddit doesn't replace all of search, but for me it does effectively replace search engines when I'm looking for an opinion. Life is short... I don't have time to weigh all the facts about something and make my own decision. While I do that a lot, when getting started with something, an initial opinion to go on is very useful. Search engines have become really bad at surfacing genuine opinions. Crappy GPT-2 generated…

> EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason.

It's because reddit has dedicated communities for so many topics. If you search for something diy related you'll find posts from a specialist sub, and this works even for the most obscure topics.

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