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The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

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Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#61

Post by tester457 »

mentos wrote: post #31

Doesn’t this illuminate an opportunity for Reddit? Close the doors and invest in Reddit search monetized with ad placement like google has?

Somehow after all these years reddit never got their search to work. You can paste a comment word for word in the search and reddit won't find it.

They're dependent on google.

Also if they somehow figure out search to work, it will be ruined because of users gaming the search system with SEO.

> However, the argument that Reddit can build a better search than Google is a flawed argument. And that flaw is the same flaw that makes Google results bad. And that flaw is money. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369402

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#62

Post by arcbyte »

Simulacra wrote: post #39

I've really gotten frustrated with google over the years and I've switched to Bing. Is Microsoft better? Probably not, but I'm a researcher, and I search fast and significantly. Google is constantly asking me to verify if I'm a human, Bing doesn't do that. I recognize that may be an individual issue, but on a broader spectrum, Bing works well.

And Bing pays you! I've gotten a few hundred dollars in rewards just for searching which is nice.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#63

Post by ZeWaka »

This really rings true - I was trying to do some semi-niche hardware/software research (wiimote on steam deck) and the only real sources for that information was on closed subreddits.

I ended up having to just view the cached pages and go on the Discord for help. It really highlighted how dependent I've become on getting pretty good results from niche subreddits.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#64

Post by treeman79 »

falcolas wrote: post #16
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #9

My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.

Google's recency bias in search results hurts them too. There are many older resources which are still valid out there, but you won't find them (easily) via Google Search. Instead, you get the SEO spam which doesn't match the search as well, but is newer.

Doesn’t help that they just give answers to a query. Answers often being very wrong. Then instead of more results they show related questions, which are often non-sensical.

This is not even getting into censorship of any political thing that google employees dislike.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#65

Post by jmclnx »

Simulacra wrote: post #39

I've really gotten frustrated with google over the years and I've switched to Bing. Is Microsoft better? Probably not, but I'm a researcher, and I search fast and significantly. Google is constantly asking me to verify if I'm a human, Bing doesn't do that. I recognize that may be an individual issue, but on a broader spectrum, Bing works well.

This is me, google is pretty much useless due to the all the captchas I get. But I ended up with duckduckgo and https://search.marginalia.nu/

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#66

Post by globular-toast »

I happened to notice this on Sunday evening. Was searching for some info on an Intel chip and some stuff from r/intel came up. I didn't even know there was an r/intel. The sub had already gone private at that point and even though I knew about the upcoming "blackouts" it still confused me.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#67

Post by the_pwner224 »

jwestbury wrote: post #34
bioemerl wrote: post #2

I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.

Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaulted to this when I was looking for, e.g., product reviews -- because it would bypass the endless SEO spam where someone found some highly-rated products on Amazon and published an article "reviewing" them. Unfortunately, Google killed that search type. There a…

Simply adding "forum" onto the search query has worked pretty well for me.

Of course, when I am aware of a specific forum which exists for that topic, site:... works well too.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#68

Post by shigawire »

dylan604 wrote: post #35
deeviant wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem isn't that Google can't detect what spam is, it's that this spam drives so much of the traffic, and thus their revenue that they cannot remove it. Google at this point is literally teaming up with spammers. Just go on a android phone and swipe left from homepage for "Google", count how many clicks it takes to get to an 100% AI generated spam page.

for those of us without an android device to try this, care to enlighten us? the way it is described it sounds like a lot of of action required which seems like a good thing, but your point seems like it's trying to make goog's results bad. i'm really not following your point

This shows a bunch of articles based on your search history - many of which are incredibly poor quality and appear to be generated in some way.

I tried to curate mine for a bit and thumbs down useless sites or content I don't care about. I didn't really succeed in making this feed helpful so I mostly ignore it.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#69

Post by treeman79 »

basch wrote: post #54
nocsi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Google biased, or are it’s users biased? If someone is looking up something technical or diagnosing a problem, the most recent post on StackOverflow would be more relevant. Old stuff can be important, but if users searches mostly comprise recent stuff - what’s the point?

Recipes. Historical things. There are way too many google searches where the best result was the top 10 years ago, and still should be the top. Instead it’s something from this year that has no information. Googling is now like talking to that person who repeats your question back to you as a statement, as if they added to the conversations. The results are some social media manager who’s job it is to make “content”…

Content is clearly being auto generated. Even the new Zelda game. Trying to search anything and it’s Tons of pages that all are extremely verbose with a consistent grammar style and not actually saying anything useful.
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