861–870 of 1001 posts
Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too have found myself searching more in Reddit. Not to throw shade on Reddit, but even if I find exactly what I’m looking for in there, it’s depressing that it’s all bound up inside of another walled garden who will eventually have the same incentive as Google: squeeze every last advertising dollar out of the produc… I mean users. Like Google, it’s just a matter of time before they too lose their balance. A questio…
A factor in there has got to be 'who pays?' If it's hostile to advertisers, then there's got to be money to pay for the infrastructure from somewhere. Maybe a tax on ISPs? I think I'd happily pay $10 extra per month for access to an ad-free interrnet. Maybe $20. But how many of the people that are already happy with the ads and poor google results would do so? Would it be sustainable?
It's easy to imagine a future where the infrastructure is something analogous to a public good, like clean water. The infrastructure is agnostic to the content.
The content, on the other hand, is a product of a massive, churning, never-ending process of intellectual work. Ads, for the most part, provide the underlying economic incentive for that work.
And the dirty little secret of all that ad-supported creative content? Its value is minimal. Truly minimal. Often low quality, incoherent. If it all went away tomorrow, I would hardly notice.
That it is nevertheless so popular is something of a paradox. I know I sound ridiculous, but at the core, I'm beginning to believe that the fact that advertising is as powerful an economic force as it is, is a reflection of the fact that people's lives are more boring and devoid of meaning than we often admit.
An important thing to realize, too, is that this is a problem that keeps getting worse. The article talks about product reviews and recipes, but it's been spreading a lot further than that. Recently I was trying to look up a technical error, and found a lot of web pages that seemed to be auto-generated with "How to solve [error_scraped_from_the_web]", complete with a list of generic things unrelated to the error (IE,…
I don’t think it’s necessarily Google search that has gotten worse. It’s just that the internet has gone bad, and is filled with low quality garbage.
Will Google combat the low quality internet? If not, search will continue to degrade, so what alternatives exist? That's the thrust of this surprisingly vehement discussion.
Me: Google for "quotes don't give":
Top result, does not contain the given phrase
Second result, does not contain that phrase
This is literally the first thing I tried and I did a view source to be sure. They are lying to us and/or themselves.
Looking at the result, I would say 1/2 the results don't include that phrase including results for products on Amazon.
Clearly Search does not work they way this Google Rep believes it to work.
How long until Google starts adding a "results from other sites" box when you add "site:reddit.com" to your query?
No. Don't ever write stuff like that on HN. You just gave some Google engineer a promotion project idea.
Some really good thoughts here. I'll summarize the ones that hit me: - "Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust." This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretl…
Oh my sweet summer child. Reddit is absolutely infested with paid shills.
"cheese bacon bread" seems to match "cheesy bacon bread", "cheese & bacon bread", etc. I'd link some example results but don't want to feed the SEO beast. I visited the sites, I viewed sources, and did not find that string. I assumed what is happening in the 2nd case is that "and" is treated like "&" and both are "punctuation" in their model. And in the first, cheesy=cheese.
While it's a trivial example and might be what most people want, it doesn't help with more technical topics. And recipe blog spam is a particularly sore point for many searchers.