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It's impossible to get accurate information about travel, hotels, locations. Results are often filled with listicle crap that each copy each other and contain o
by pastelsky 5y ago
It's impossible to get accurate information about travel, hotels, locations. Results are often filled with listicle crap that each copy each other and contain outdated pop content.
I've become so used to suffixing these queries with "forum" or "reddit" to get articles written by real humans.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoA funny thing is that the spammers are adapting to this. I found a bunch of websites that all had "reddit" in the title a while back, because that is something people add to filter out the spam. https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/reddit-spam.png https://memex.marginalia.nu/pics/reddit-spam.png
- daxuak 5y agoI use `site:reddit.com` instead of `inurl:...` or just reddit.
- umvi 5y agoCompanies are adapting to this too - marketers are increasingly purchasing or grooming high-rep accounts for astroturfing select subreddits related to company products
- jcfrei 5y agoLet's hope reddit users catch on to this and downvote such posts / comments.
- asdff 5y agoThey don't, honestly this stuff goes to the top and its been this way for a long long time. Any niche interest subreddit that has gear or products has a sidebar with some stuff that's ordained by the moderation team to be "The best X for Y" and therefore incessantly recommended in the comments and all over the subreddit. Sometimes you will even see metathreads where the users are complaining about the recommendations listed in the subreddit's official wiki or faq page.
- technion 5y agoThere's been a influx of "memes" that just say things like "when you buy new sunglasses from x.com" and it's just a picture of Leonardo DiCaprio making a face. My own friends repost these things on social media because they are "funny". Not only do people not see problem, they literally see ads as worthy of being reshared.
- sph 5y agoYes, companies on Reddit have learned to use memes to promote their product organically on that site. And if a meme is particularly good, soon you have unaffiliated users happily parroting it, just like that "Hotel? T***" which I've seen mentioned so many times on that site from random users. Or just have a memelord managing your Twitter, and soon your latest funny post will find its place all over the internet. I have never eaten at Wendy's in my life nor stepped on US soil once, yet I have seen their "memes" dozens of times.
- TheRealDunkirk 5y agoI don't know what you people are on about. I have never found useful information at Reddit. I frequently use "-site:reddit.com" to avoid the nonsense.
- thangalin 5y agoA combination that works well for product recommendations: site:reddit.com inurl:bifl
- Bombthecat 5y agoWhy bifl? What's for?
- Dachande663 5y agoBuy It For Life. Subreddit aimed at buying once vs the modern buy cheap, buy twice.
- notreallyserio 5y agoIt's unfortunately a lot of survivor bias, but I like looking at photos of turn of the century items.
- zbentley 5y ago> It's unfortunately a lot of survivor bias In this case, isn't that the selection criteria rather than an interfering bias?
- Rastonbury 5y agoThat comment was hilariously oblivious
- notreallyserio 5y agoIt's both, I think. If the goal is to find high quality items survivor bias can definitely interfere with the results. The items must survive long enough to count as something you can use "for life" and it's possible, even likely, that they only survived due to low use or extraordinary care.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- geoduck14 5y agoSerious question: Why don't you go straight to reddit, and search there?
- drumhead 5y agoreddit search is awful and has been since the beginning. Im hoping they spend some of the money theyve raised on improving that as a priority.
- tomrod 5y agoThey seem to be fixated instead on forcing a terrible UI front end and ... not much else. Maybe some moderator tool updates after a decade that were also user hostile.
- vxNsr 5y agoBec Reddit search itself is worse than google
- ncann 5y agoWorse than Google is putting it lightly... It's more or less useless.
- skeletal88 5y agoAt reddit they decided that you should not have to option to restrict your search to a specific subreddit anymore. Why they did that? It's a terrible idea!
- detaro 5y agoFor me reddit defaults to "search in current subreddit", with a link to "Show results from all of Reddit" at the top?
- richardsocher 5y agoIf you get an account on you.com you can set that preference once and your preferred sites will always come up higher.
- ncpa-cpl 5y agoOne useful feature I use before visiting new places is sorting Google Maps reviews and photos by date. I've found Google Maps comments more accurate than TripAdvisor or Airbnb.
- dleslie 5y agoYou ought to try using duck duck go. It's all about being a portal to other search services. Ie, searching for `foo` on reddit is: "!r foo"
- sefrost 5y agoThe problem with that is it redirects you to the Reddit search page, which isn't great. It's much better for me to use "site:reddit.com [query]" on DDG than to use the !r.
- CactusOnFire 5y agoDuck Duck Go is great at naive searches, though having context into why I'm searching for something can be helpful too. I couldn't make the switch over for my work while programming.
- cpeterso 5y agoSeems like we need a search engine for trusted sites, something like MetaCrawler that searches more specialized search engines. There are some sites I trust for travel information. There are other sites I trust for reviews of consumer products and others for movies.
- goodells 5y agoEven appending “reddit” is often inadequate, as the algorithm seems to artificially limit one search result item (potentially with some children under it, but unrelated threads, 2-3 more items) per host. So it becomes necessary to use “site:www.reddit.com” to get more than a few non-sucky results.
- deelowe 5y agoI had no idea others have begun resorting to this as well these days. My assumption was that I had just somehow gotten worse/impatient at researching things or that reddit was just a more reliable source these days. Thinking back, may search quality has just gotten wrose.
- DSingularity 5y agoExactly my experience this year. For products I have to watch so many videos. Last year it was easier and all reading.
- sidibe 5y agoReddit is a great place to get recommended the most expensive stuff. 99% of the time the best sellers on Amazon work great for me, but if I look at Reddit they insist only a couple very expensive brands are worth owning in any category of item. It's crazy and sometimes I even fall for it. Can't tell if it's marketing or if people very into their hobbies become obsessed with tiny differences.
- neuronic 5y agoReddit is full of subversive marketing. The real communities discussing their passions are absolutely exploited by "undercover" PR agencies.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rowanajmarshall 5y agoI find that's true in specialised subs, but not wider ones. Like, if you're looking for a good coffee grinder, r/coffee will only recommend the top-end stuff, but if you search in something r/AskReddit you get more 'approachable' results.
- kristofferR 5y agoThey are correct for coffee grinders though, it's almost pointless to cheap out of them, you negate all the benefits of grinding it yourself when you buy a subpar non-burr grinder that doesn't produce a consistent grain size. Buying a blade grinder is like buying a hammer with a spongy face.
- plorkyeran 5y agoBuying a blade grinder is a waste of money, but burr grinders range from $50 to $500 and while there is a significant quality difference, it can be reasonable to buy one at the cheaper end.
- baxuz 5y agoI've made a custom search in Chrome with the "r" hotkey, that searches Reddit in the past year. Sites are also starting to just fake the dates so I'm getting really old results on regular. This takes care of both: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site%3Areddit.com&tbs=qdr:y
- lifeplusplus 5y agoThis! Had a printer bug and all results where like top 3 ways to share a printer