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Lately I find myself inserting "site:reddit.com" at the end of my Google searches. Most of the stuff that shows up by default is pure garbage that is riddled wi
by marmshallow 6y ago
Lately I find myself inserting "site:reddit.com" at the end of my Google searches. Most of the stuff that shows up by default is pure garbage that is riddled with ads and doesn't answer my question quickly.
- kannan_ak 6y agoSame here. From basic questions to daily struggles, I go to reddit. Maybe I can relate more to the opinions of common people than the so called expert advice in the websites.
- redisman 6y agoIt’s all blog spam these days. Feels like reading AI generated junk that tells me nothing of value
- izacus 6y agoFunny enough, people on specialised reddits can be much better experts than random blog spammers.
- pvida 6y agoYes, same here. I noticed reddit is much better at providing (useful and direct) answers. I think part of the reason for that is that off-reddit there's so much emphasis on SEO and analytics (trying to hit all the right keywords, linking to other pages/sites, tricking people to stay on a page/site longer etc.) that everything becomes very cluttered very quickly.
- prox 6y agoI switched to DDG mostly, and nowadays its results are great for most cases. Imo Google is a habit to break.
- LoSboccacc 6y agoI switched to DDG a while back when I jumped out of chrome when was threatening adblockers, but I'm not always satisfied with the search results: it's great if I know what I want to search (i.e. I know the field and the keywords and I need the specifics) but when I don't know what I want to search I can't use it for discovery (i.e. when learning new things and I lack the terminology)
- matham 6y agoI have been using DDG a little more frequently recently, however, it's image search was useless whenever I tried it.
- throwaway47380 6y agoFunnily enough, my experience is that the best image search engine is Yandex's. E.g. searching for a page from a comic with Google just gives me random comics, but Yandex's will more often find that exact comic.
- chris_f 6y agoAlso, Yandex has an reverse image search [0] that works for faces. It's a little creepy, but an interesting tool to find similar looking pictures of people. [0] https://yandex.com/images/ https://yandex.com/images/
- burgerrito 6y agoThe problem with DDG is that it doesn't do really well for non-English results. I use DDG now, but sometimes I do have to use !g to redirect to Google.
- Akronymus 6y agoThe bangs are one of the main draws of DDG for me. Besides not being google.
- itsmeamario 6y agoDDG. Come looking for anonymity, stay for the bangs.
- ignoramous 6y agoI used https://lite.duckduckgo.com https://lite.duckduckgo.com for a long time because of its near instant redirects, but it recently broke Firefox's omnisearch, and so I've all but stopped using it for even that. The bangs are painfully slow over the main duckduckgo site. Miss the bangs.
- pgcj_poster 6y agoBeing made by the French, Qwant.com seems to give better non-English results than DuckDuckGo and gives similar priority to privacy.
- PoignardAzur 6y agoQwant has a reputation on r/france for being completely awful. Not sure how justified that reputation is. Also, for non-trivial results, Qwant is mostly a fancy Bing front-end, so you might as well use Bing.
- BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y agoUsed DDG for two years. Now switched to Qwant. Much better and not US based.
- ur-whale 6y agoNot a fan of Google, but Qwant is simply unusable.
- spideymans 6y agoAnecdote 1: I was Googling a lot of information on Angular, back when I was first introduced to the framework a year or two ago. I'd say that well over half of the content surfaced by Google was SEO spam: marketers masquerading as tutorials, with the sole intent of upselling me on some shitty Angular plug-in. A lot of them are clever about it too; they don't upsell you until you've invested a decent amount of time reading their "tutorials". The SEO spam only went away as I began entering more granular search queries, as my familiarity with the framework improved. Anecdote 2: I have a close friend that is a high school teacher. She's not all that tech savvy, so I help her out sometimes. Google is damn near useless when it comes to helping her develop her courses. Not exaggerating at all... maybe 60, 70... 80 percent of the results for educational queries are SEO spam. Every result is essentially, "want to learn how to write a monologue? Click here to pay $20/month for the privilege". It's gotten so bad that I jokingly tell her that it would be more efficient to just walk down to the library and take out a book on whatever topic she's querying. But, you know, they do say that every joke has an element of truth to it...
- globuous 6y agoA friend of mine not too tech savy always clicks on these sponsored google links that take a page and a half on some screens when looking something up. I always tell him "you clicked on an ad !" and still, he always clicks on the 2-3 ads showing up before the results, even years after. Mind not that he's a UI/UX designer, his job is attention to detail, yet, he still cannot discriminate between results and sponsored links on the google search page. I wonder how many people do that, but it must make Google a lot of cash !
- londons_explore 6y agoJust install an adblocker for him.
- cosmodisk 6y agoOnly a small % do that. However that small percentage is enough to generate billions in revenue.
- 6y ago
- asddubs 6y agoI've been doing this too sometimes. i swear google has gotten worse. sometimes it just ignores half the search terms, even if you put them in quotes. and yeah, I also get a lot of SEO spam results
- stabbles 6y agoHow to google: make duckduckgo your default search engine, enter "[term] !g site:reddit.com".
- Hates_ 6y agoDDG has a Reddit bang which does the same: !greddit
- voqv 6y agoGoogle used to have a forum tab for search results with only user generated content among discussions and forums! Damn, I still remember how sad and frustrated I was on the day they removed it with no explanation.
- blisseyGo 6y agoI find google's search filters are 100% broken. Just tested this myself again. Try searching for site:reddit.com best headphones And click "Tools" and set the date filter to be "Past week" for example. Click the first result. You will notice it's from a year ago. Click the second result, it's from 2 years ago and so on. Not a single result matches the date filter. Similar issues with the other filters. It's 100% broken and been this way for at least a year now as far as I remember.
- joking 6y agoThe google filter means modified on the last 2 weeeks, and dynamic pages have related posts and other part of the pages that change, so those filters are not going to work well on something like Reddit.
- epanchin 6y agoGoogle should rely on a last modified date supplied by an author, and penalise sites that change it without actual changes to the content. Or alternatively, improve their algorithm for detecting page changes. Somehow it should be improved, as it’s a useful feature.
- blisseyGo 6y agoI am fairly certain this feature used to work well earlier last year. It broke sometime in summer last year as I even made a post on Reddit asking if this was a new bug. Unless the redesign of Reddit broke this somehow? But as far as I know, this has broken for other sites too. And Reddit redesign is over 2 years old now.
- fauigerzigerk 6y agoI find this sort of issue very encouraging. You sometimes think, how am I ever going to compete with someone like Google? They can hire more PhDs per day than I can write lines of code. And then this. An unsolved problem that they could have solved 20 years ago - recognising that pages are not necessarily one atomic unit and that different parts can be updated at different times. Or more generally that different types of websites require slightly different approaches to search. It's not a trivial problem if you think about it. But for a search company to get this completely wrong even for a global top 100 discussion forum requires a severe lack of incentives. And that's where I get the sinking feeling that I shouldn't be encouraged by Google's failure at all, because those incentives are difficult to fix for anyone. I'm pessimistic about Ramaswamy's approach. Putting a paid ad blocker on Bing isn't going to fix this.
- coronadisaster 6y agoGoogle search started to decline in quality since the release of GooglePlus (since they removed the + operator and replaced it with double quotes).
- eitland 6y agoDouble quotes existed before as well. + and " had different meanings but were combined into one. And yes, it was around that time that search quality took a nose dive for me.
- pavlus 6y agoAFAIK "+" is just space replacement, and quotes don't work anymore, verbatim flag is now used instead.
- eitland 6y agoNote that I use past tense in my post above. Also unless you work at Google or have done extensive research: I think you are still wrong.
- coronadisaster 6y agoyou must be a teenager for not remembering the + operator... it was really useful for finding what you want.
- ma2rten 6y agoMaybe if enough people do the same, reddit will start attracting the same kind of SEO spam. It's almost like Google is the victim of its own success. If everyone try to game your system some will success.
- rwmj 6y agoI was just thinking a few days ago: Google is starting to resemble the last days of Altavista, where the results were full of junk. If you use Firefox, some results that are full of a Firefox-specific scam where "you are the billionth search result" (maybe it also happens for other browsers). This has been going on for years now - I noticed it because scammers were scraping my blog for content and republishing it but making searches terms redirect to scam sites.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DominikD 6y agoI'm not sure I'd search on reddit if I wanted quality results. ;)
- ur-whale 6y agoActually, Google has gotten so bad that stuff on reddit is more informative. That's got to tell you where Google is at this point.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- chris_f 6y agoI made a web search tool [0] that pulls Reddit results (and other sources) directly into the SERP. I'm working off the thesis that combining highly relevant vertical results is the best way to combat SEO. As a fun aside, when I did a Show HN for this tool, the title was "Runnaroo, a new search engine that didn't raise 37.5M to launch" as a friendly joke toward Neeva. Dang changed it later to be just "Runnaroo, a new search engine." [0] Example search for "bose headphones reddit": https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bose%20headphone%20reddit https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=bose%20headphone%20redd...
- tifadg1 6y agosort by date doesn't work. Neither does on google, but if you're trying to get me to bookmark, what's your distinct advantage over the easy to remember site:reddit.com?
- chris_f 6y agoYour feedback is helpful, I just added the sort by data feature, and it is a work in progress. Regarding, "what's your distinct advantage over the easy to remember site:reddit.com" It's arguable that just typing 'reddit' with the query is easier to remember than typing "site:reddit.com" for most people, but you can have the best of both worlds and still use the site operator and get direct Reddit results [0]. [0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=site%3Areddit.com+best+headphones https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=site%3Areddit.com+best+...
- volkk 6y agoi've found runnaroo to be super helpful with programming related results where i can actually find useful blog posts instead of those spam SEO low quality ones. awesome site. thanks
- stOneskull 6y agoi love this. in the article, it's mentioned how one idea is stackoverflow results, and then i see that that's nicely done in runnaroo. as well as others depending on the search. excellent search tool. cheers!
- IAmGraydon 6y agoI’ve been doing the same for a while, but Google also seems to be actively limiting and censoring reddit results as well.
- jerome-jh 6y agoMy main grief with Google is that it frequently omits keywords, contrary to DDG. As to trying to make people confuse organic results and ads, Bing is by far the worst. It often proposes malware sites when queried with open-source projects (try VLC, Audacity). Sure having a search engine do exactly what the user requests would be great for us, IT people. Not sure it is possible to build much traffic with that alone, though.
- bsdubernerd 6y agoDDG also omits search terms, sadly. It just does so a bit less blatantly than Google.
- lostmsu 6y agoI think DDG started doing it within last 6 months. When I just switched to it, this was not the problem. Now I am almost back to using Google, because when Google omits terms, results are a bit more on the topic (when forced not to, DDG and G work similarly).
- bsdubernerd 6y agoDDG always omitted terms as far as I can remember (definitely 1+y). I can't say for sure if this got more frequent in recent times or not.
- arbirk 6y agoThis. Google is in a bad state after their switch to the nlp engine. Now when you search for very specific things you end up with list of all phone number combinations or some other spam
- nklayer 6y agoAnd if your queries are too specific while not being logged in, you get the "unusual traffic" captcha and can volunteer to improve Google's image recognition programs.
- SquishyPanda23 6y ago!r on DuckDuckGo is slightly less typing and easier on the muscle memory. I use !g for Google pretty frequently, but there are many searches I just send directly to the site I think has the best answer.
- user00012-ab 6y agowhich is weird, because I have never found a useful response on reddit. I find people asking the exact question I have, but then there are either no responses, joke responses, or people also asking for help. I'm still tricked every time though, I see the result matching exactly what i'm looking for, I disable my reddit block from browser, click the link, and am 99.9% of time disappointed in the result.