39 ms·

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 re

• eternauta3k 5y ago
  Thanks, I hadn't realized I can use site:reddit.com also for recipes!
• judge2020 5y ago
  > This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Tons of people don't, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they're tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people', and that means striving for fixing the complete word soup of search results people type in.
  • ravishi 5y ago
    It's funny to observe my stepson learning his way through Google. It's happening mostly through the assistants on TVs and locked cellphones. But he's learning to do exactly what you said: half-second thoughts and brute forcing many queries for the same subject. He's 7.
  • narag 5y ago
    That's like speaking to little children, that are learning to talk, reproducing their errors. Some adults believe that it's cute, but it's idiotic, confuses the babies and make their progress more difficult and slow.
    • recursive 5y ago
      It's not idiotic if it's what the people (generally) want.
      • dylan604 5y ago
        You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa? Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!" Babies must look at adults doing the googoo gaagaa, and think to themselves that these adults are absolute morons. The sites that Googs returns are basically the internet's version of googoo gaagaa. I look at the websites returned, and often think that the site's owners must be morons. Useless drivel clearly designed to game the Goog search results. I think think about how moronic it is that Googs allows this.
        • recursive 5y ago
          "Googoo gaagaa" sounds like happy baby babble to me. Mine would more like "waaaaaaaAAAAaahhh" when they were hungry. Congratulations on recognizing the true morons.
          • kuboble 5y ago
            In my experience waaaaaaaAAAAaahhh meant wet diaper or something hurts. Leeeeeah, leeeaaaahhh was being hungry. Phonetically is similar to the beginning of a polish word mleko (milk)
        • narag 5y ago
          You think the baby really wants to hear googoo gaagaa? Now, they are trying to say "I'm hungry. Feed me!" I suspect they know the sound they want to make but they don't know how to articulate it. They make an approximation and we can encourage them repeating the correct version, so they realize we understood what they're trying to do: "you're half way" but repeating their approximation is misleading.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Yep. How many bug reports are useful vs how many are "the button didn't work"? Google is optimizing for that.
  • Tempest1981 5y ago
    Right. Feels like it's optimized for common voice queries, in sentence form. They've sacrificed technical/HN users to focus on this.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • lubujackson 5y ago
      Ask Jeeves is back, baby!
  • arketyp 5y ago
    This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn't quite pick up or don't know how to spell, or if I only remember fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in the right direction. That being said, I wish I could explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally. Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar. They have these kinds of prompt mechanics for GPT3, so I doesn't seem too unrealistic, even if it's all ML nowadays.
    • KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
      You can though, put quotes around it.
      • layer8 5y ago
        Google still decides to interpret that however they like. Even the verbatim option in Search Tools doesn’t always help.
      • amptorn 5y ago
        That's stopped working! Google is just ignoring them from time to time now. Did you even read the article?
        • bambax 5y ago
          I read the article, and the HN comment it links to, but didn't find an example in either, and it doesn't match my experience. Does someone have a concrete example when using quotes results in pages not containing the search terms?
          • adamc 5y ago
            I've hit this many, many times, but I'm not sure I can easily reproduce it. Tends to happen when there are more search terms, in my experience.
          • allochthon 5y ago
  • reaperducer 5y ago
    Tons of people don't, though Do they? I see this stated all the time, with no references. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches. Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food. The same way some cities limit parking at big events so that people have to take mass transit. It's for their own good, but they have to be shown the way. Google has optimized for working 'most of the time' for 'the most people This may be Google's goal, but it hasn't happened yet. I don't have very many friends or acquaintances in the tech bubble, so I base my observations around real people in the real world. More and more they're giving up on Google entirely. Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and other non-Google sources. When I ask someone why they're searching Amazon reviews for tech support information, they tell me because it's not on the web. That's Google's failure.
    • Mezzie 5y ago
      > Perhaps if Google didn't try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches. As someone who's been a public librarian, I can tell you that is not how people work.
      • ako 5y ago
        You can only be thoughtful with your search if you know what you are searching for. But oftentimes i'm not really certain what i'm looking for, or i don't know the exact terminology that should be used, so i'll just enter some related terms, in the hope that google leads me in the right direction.
        • Mezzie 5y ago
          At the minimum. A truly thoughtful search requires an understanding of: - What you're searching for, which as you mention means terminology and knowing that information exists. (If you don't know that there's a country called Burkina Faso, it's never going to occur to you to search for its capital) - How each of your search tools works, its benefits and drawbacks. It's similar to selecting a programming language or framework: If I need to know a holiday date (e.g. I can never remember when the fuck President's Day is), I'll Google it because that's something even a normal person would notice if they screwed up. On the other hand, when I'm looking for current events information, I use a search tool that specializes in news searches for journalists and researchers because I don't want my search results biased by what Google thinks I want to see. - The domain in which you're searching, so you can evaluate what the search tools provide for you and use the tools iteratively. - Your own abilities and desires, which requires self-knowledge. A search is only a success if it produces something helpful to the searcher, and something they can't understand or won't use = not a successful search - What information is and is not available. It sounds like a silly thing, but this is how a lot of scams work: They're testing for people who lack a certain subset of common knowledge. For example, I've seen articles talking about local elections that imply nefarious intent behind some information not being provided online, and they're obviously written by people who don't commonly work with local election data. Because if they did, they'd know that when working with local election data, the default is 'idk we have it in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere'. Search is HARD and Google has figured out one tiny, tiny part. It's just the part that was the easiest to build with what they had and that was easiest to monetize.
  • some_furry 5y ago
    Here's a perfect example of this phenomenon. https://archive.md/wwMY3 https://archive.md/wwMY3 https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+is+linux https://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+is+linux&oq=how+old+...
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • dannysullivan 5y ago
      Fortunately, most of those web results give a pretty good rundown on the history of Linux. But yes, this is weird! I'll get it looked at.
      • some_furry 5y ago
        If you can publish a postmortem I'd be really fascinated to read what happened to produce this result
  • cml 5y ago
    A single mediocre experience optimized to work ‘most of the time’ for ‘most people’ is quite contrary to the narrative that has made Google such tremendous amounts of money (“let us surveil you so that you can have a more personalized experience”) though, isn’t it? Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for if their past behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn’t the “search only for <exact query>“ option be a very good data point on making that determination automatically, or enabling a user setting for “give me exact results based on what I actually typed by default”? It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do with the value of ads for “big” keywords than with (poorly) inferring user intent.
    • the_other 5y ago
      Wouldn’t it be remarkable if we found out that personalised advertising actually earned less than just auctioning off the obvious big keywords?
      • ThalesX 5y ago
        I worked for a healthcare recruitment company in a capital city with some large hospitals and a number of universities. I can't for the life of me understand why they chose to spend so much money on trying to track healthcare professionals online when they could just advertise it on-premise where they actually hang out.
      • scim-knox-twox 5y ago
        We already know that “personalized ads” aren't much netter than context one: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-extra-value-for-online-publishers-study-suggests/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-... Also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/06/03/those-bots-did-what/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2020/06/03/those-b... I can't understand why every company want me offer “personalized” service. It never works, and if I can't manually set preferences, then it's not personalized (because “personalization” means exactly that).
    • 5y ago
  • robbedpeter 5y ago
    Google has optimized to whatever sequence of behaviors achieves the most profit. The search results are not chosen for utility to the user but as nudges in a cycle of influence intended to drive you to attend to an ad, purchase something, or consume particular content. They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from clear.
    • samhw 5y ago
      Advertising is not 'market manipulation': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation. This dialect of 'Substackspeak' is starting to feel like SEO for HN readers.
      • selfhoster11 5y ago
        I use market manipulation to mean just that, someone manipulating the market in whatever way. I'm not familiar with the legally-oriented meaning of this term.
      • robbedpeter 5y ago
        Market cornering is classic market manipulation. Google uses every asset at their disposal to maintain their 98%+ death grip on the search markets. The list of competitors bought, stifled, legally crushed, or absorbed is probably endless. The search market is thoroughly cornered. I used the phrase intentionally and specifically. Advertising isn't always market manipulation, but it can be and is used to that purpose. Google uses advertisement and content "curation" to manipulate consumers. This results in product preference, purchasing behavior, and market conditions favorable to Google and/or unfavorable to Google's competition. This includes siloing consumers in political bubbles and manipulation of narratives through the deliberate selection, order, and pacing of content exposure based on the intent of Google's shotcallers. The reinforcement cycles inherent to their algorithms are used to manage the information made available to vast numbers of people, with highly detailed behavioral profiles used to achieve behavioral outcomes, whether it's buying something, voting, or preferences for or against particular policies or candidates.
  • coffeefirst 5y ago
    Right, although piping junk into the search box and expecting it to bring back something useful is trained behavior. I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing that surprises me isn't the kind and quality of the results, it's that I actually need to use my brain to search. It's not about whether this is a good or a bad thing—I kind of like the precision in a way, it's just jarring how different it is as an experience.
  • mcv 5y ago
    But isn't Google supposed to know everything about us by now? Surely they know who types correct search queries and who keeps making typos?
  • emodendroket 5y ago
    I honestly find it pretty helpful. You can type "russian murder painting" into Google and it will come up with Ivan the Terrible and His Son. All that hinting may be annoying if you know exactly what you wanted, but I'm not a specialist in everything I ever search for.
    • kelnos 5y ago
      Then again, both DuckDuckGo and Kagi also give that result for that search phrase. As well as being more generally useful for more specific searches as well.
    • mcv 5y ago
      What would be nice is if you could toggle this behaviour. Sometimes I know exactly what I'm looking for, sometimes I don't. Assuming I never do is at least as silly as assuming I always do. Just give me the option. I am frankly baffled that after all this focus on "personalised search", they still don't actually allow you to personalise your search like that.
      • betwixthewires 5y ago
        You can. Or at least you used to be able to, by putting your query in double quotes. Apparently it no longer works either.
      • emodendroket 5y ago
        Don't you just put words or phrases in double quotes when you want to tell it you know what you want?
  • ultrarunner 5y ago
    This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class Inheritance +ruby' to require results to include "ruby". They killed this for Google+ by changing it to quotes, so `Class Inheritance "ruby"' but now they interpret even those. When I use Google, which is less and less, I am not looking for a fight with a computer to express my intent, I'm looking for the answer to a question. That never seemed to be an issue until recently.
    • siliconescapee 5y ago
      I don't have any recent information on how google search works, but years ago it looked at the expertise level of the searcher. So newbies received newbie results, advanced searchers received advanced results (and more visibility into filtering functionality). Today... they're hiding the advanced features and also seem to be reducing personalization of results to save compute resources. It's horrible. You: Class Inheritance +ruby Google: searching for "cash inheritance..."
      • dannysullivan 5y ago
        I work for Google Search -- we never operated like this. We don't know that someone is somehow a "newbie" vs and "advanced" searcher and change (nor did change) the results somehow.
      • rawoke083600 5y ago
        I as a programmer can't imagine anyone building a search engine like this ? As far as my personal experience(n=1) with Google, I have also have never experience anything remotely like this.
    • dannysullivan 5y ago
      I work for Google Search. If you put a word or a phrase in quotes, we will only find things that have that exact word or phrase. Nothing has changed in this. When it happens that people feel it fails, it's often that they don't realize we've matched that word or phrase appearing in ALT text or text that's appearing in a less visible part of the page -- or in a few cases, the page might have changed since we indexed it.
  • beerandt 5y ago
    No, because they broke quotes. That's going out of the way to try and tell me what I think.
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    I see what you are saying but it seems to me that it used to do a much better job at that. These days I feel like I'm fighting the search engine constantly and it is certainly not magically finding what I want anymore. It feels like some crusty unmaintained tool that I have to know how to use.
  • userbinator 5y ago
    A less charitable interpretation --- and unfortunately one that could be true --- is that Google does not want you to think. It wants to keep you stupid because it's easier to deceive those who can't think and bend their thoughts in the direction that gives G more $$$. I'd say it's not merely optimising for the stupid; it's actively encouraging it. It wants to be your brain, control your thoughts and life.
• xhkkffbf 5y ago
  • bitwize 5y ago
    Not sure what woke activists have to do with it. It's not hard to guess whom Google is beholden to from recent search results: advertisers. They are increasingly an ad platform, not a search engine or informational resource. Makes me yearn for the days of the public library, which just might make a resurgence to fill the vacuum Google has left.
  • legalcorrection 5y ago
    You have to search Yandex if you want English-language counter cultural (i.e. reactionary) content.
  • Majestic121 5y ago
    Your case might or might not be true on political topics, and I won't engage on that, but I think OP mostly mentions impact on product reviews and other more 'down to earth' topics. I don't think woke activists would care too much about shoe brands, so I think your response is missing the point at hand, which is that search results (including but not only political ones) are deteriorating fast
  • kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    Do you have any specifics?
    • _dain_ 5y ago
      google image search for "white inventors". it shows you black inventors. likewise "american inventors", 9/10 image results are african-american inventors.
      • mongol 5y ago
        Could not that be a reflection of "the web is woke" rather than "Google is woke", though?
• est31 5y ago
  reddit's search isn't that helpful though. I often get to reddit from Google, sometimes I even do site:reddit.com, but still using Google's search.
  • chucksta 5y ago
    Its not about reddit as a search, it's about using reddit to validate your search because the alternative would likely yield poor results. You could trust the 10 listacles that came up as the first results that all look oddly similar, or you can try and filter through reddit by including it in your search terms
• oldstrangers 5y ago
  Working at a marketing agency, I can promise you the Dead Internet Theory really isn't even a conspiracy. It's depressing.
  • lpcvoid 5y ago
    Be the change you want to see!
  • salt-thrower 5y ago
    I did software dev at a marketing firm for about a year, and it was pretty soul sucking, so I know what you mean. I won't work at one again unless it's literally my only option.
    • lethologica 5y ago
      I’ve been there too. The sad thing was that the people I worked with were genuinely great and smart people but you’re spot on about the actual state of the environment being a depressing and soul draining thing. I quit that job on moral grounds, I just couldn’t be a part of that any more.
• eloeffler 5y ago
  About the "dead internet conspiracy" - I've worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large "help" website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low. The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on the website into the articles. The result is trashy articles that could well have been written by a bot but aren't. This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we're far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work. It's people but they work like bots.
  • jpicard 5y ago
    Bloomberg and other news orgs publish bot-assisted articles, for example to summarize financial reports the moment they appear. https://archive.fo/1EjSu https://archive.fo/1EjSu
  • hef19898 5y ago
    Regardless of automation, there will always be jobs that are so "dumb" but still expensive to automate that people can do cheaper then machines.
    • cjbgkagh 5y ago
      Within the last 6 months I’m seeing a rise of very good NLP content farms that almost have what I’m looking for but not quite. I think what they do is start off a transformer based NLP with example queries that others have searched for and it generates a realistic looking answer that’s usually wrong. The scale and breadth of these could only be done by machines.
    • hombre_fatal 5y ago
      Writing SEO content isn't necessarily one of them anymore. Check out AI content services like https://www.frase.io/ https://www.frase.io/. You can also generate things like product descriptions inside the GPT-3 playground.
  • 5y ago
• gkkirilov 5y ago
  Great take on the topic. I completely agree, love the small communities that form in Reddit and there I can find the experts to ask.
  • dtemkin 5y ago
    StackExchange is better for an informed discussion. Reddit has become too much like Yahoo! Answers.
• zucked 5y ago
  I, too, search "<search term> + reddit" often for product reviews and such. Thing is, the results on that front have started to slide as the paid review side of the internet catches on. I'm finding that it's getting harder and harder to trust the reddit search results - lots of shill accounts and obvious junk. That's not a google problem, specifically, but it's another degradation of a workaround for declining search result quality :(
  • bee_rider 5y ago
    The only real advantage of reddit is that somebody will usually be insulting the ad account, so you can hopefully glean some truth from the insults.
    • Firmwarrior 5y ago
      Unless there's a critical mass of shills, and then anyone who speaks out against them will get banned and/or downvoted to oblivion..
      • tartuffe78 5y ago
        Usually I trust Reddit threads where users give pros/cons of multiple competing products. Things like running shoes users have usually tried a lot out and liked them for different reasons. If those match with the one pair I've tried out it seems like a useful data point for decision making.
  • Firmwarrior 5y ago
    Yeah, a lot of subreddits are clogged with the same bad info that's gotten all over Google's front page. The stickied "list of recommendations" on an enthusiast sub is just the same as you'd get from clicking the top result of "Best X 2022" on Google, complete with affiliate links
  • propter_hoc 5y ago
    Use "<search term> site:reddit.com". That will exclusively restrict you to results from reddit.
• steve_adams_86 5y ago
  There’s something sad and ironic about using Google to search Reddit. One, I mostly dislike using Reddit - I only want to see specific discussions very occasionally. Two, what is the state of the internet if I have to use the best search engine to find content on a website I mostly dislike? Haha.
  • cableshaft 5y ago
    Reddit's search engine is kind of crap (not terrible, but also not great). That's why I use Google for Reddit, to have a better Reddit search experience. I figured that's why it's so high, is Reddit's UX keeps slowly getting worse so the best way to find stuff on Reddit is by searching outside of it.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  I like this conspiracy theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mettamage 5y ago
  > - "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." Haha, the noobs. I use HN instead sunglasses cool face A bit more seriously: I fully agree with this. And if HN doesn't have what I'm looking for then I use Reddit as well. But if HN has some info on the topic with a few highly upvoted threads, damn, it always impresses me.
  • brimble 5y ago
    When I'm looking into some project or piece of software I'm unfamiliar with, I really do search for HN posts on it. Fastest way to cut through (enough) of the biased material and get something genuine. Even hyped stuff usually has enough contrarian posts to give you an idea of where to look for the skeletons.
    • throw10920 5y ago
      HN has now been around a while, is really popular, and is starting to catch the attention of ad/marketing companies now, though - how do you know what here is genuine? Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market for a little extra cash...
      • flyinghamster 5y ago
        And it's not just the spammers. Any topic that touches domestic or international politics in any way almost instantly brings out a lot of bad-faith actors, here or anywhere else on the internet. > Even the heuristic of "only trust accounts older than n years" isn't perfect, as eventually a few people will undoubtedly sell their old accounts on a dark web market for a little extra cash... Yikes, I hadn't thought of that angle. That would explain some of the long-dormant accounts on Some Other Place that suddenly start spewing out-of-character garbage, assuming they weren't password-guessed, data-breached, or keylogged by some rando.
      • mettamage 5y ago
• legalcorrection 5y ago
  Searching Reddit helps but the quality of comments has gotten lower since 2015 or so. It seems to coincide with the wave of subreddit bans and the nakedly politically-driven moderation on subreddits. And with the reflexive attitude—against anything countering the Reddit consensus—that developed during the Trump years. High quality posters seem to have withdrawn from the site (at least in how much they comment) and what's left is mostly ignorant teenagers and bitter millennials with shitty jobs. In turn, that crowd is much less likely to upvote high-quality thoughtful content, so the cycle continues. The decline in quality has trickled even into the less popular subs. Don't get me wrong, the site has always had problems, but the more recent decline in thoughtfulness is dramatic. The worst part is that despite Reddit getting so much worse, there is no other place that's grown to fill the void. This place is great, and I do search HN when it makes sense, but it's small and narrow in scope. Reddit basically crowds out any competing websites by sucking up all the low-level chatter required to sustain a community, but has also pushed away high-quality posters, who now have no place to go. Very tragic but maybe a good case study in shitty network effects.
  • fallingknife 5y ago
    With quality comes success. With success comes popularity. With popularity comes idiots.
  • D13Fd 5y ago
    I find the idea that banning Trump supporters killed reddit to be pretty far-fetched. To the extent there is a change in quality, it probably comes from other factors, including having a bigger, broader, and different user base now than in the past (and only a small portion of that change likely came from Trump-related bans).
    • jasonladuke0311 5y ago
      Parent didn't say Trump supporters. And I completely agree with their observation. Quality went completely off a cliff around that time. I think it just officially entrenched the Reddit orthodoxy and that there is a "right way" to think, and that infected even non-political subreddits. Not all though, I know some subs are much better and open to discussion than in the past.
• winternett 5y ago
  Another factor that isn't being fully accounted for is a new SEO/marketing technique where many people are asking scripted questions publicly on sites like reddit and then stealthily providing answers that market a product or service. This leads to reddit results not being exactly authentic as well. Pretty much most online reviews cannot be trusted as we are begged to do positive reviews of companies (and when companies outright purchase positive reviews, which is also very rampant) also as a factor. Though Google is at fault for letting their service falter to the "payola" race, many other factors are in play all across the Internet since data quality has faltered almost totally. For major-cost and non-refundable purchases I need to trust, I go to brick and mortar stores and inspect what I am buying. I am thankful not everything has shifted to an online-only model. It's going to be a very bumpy ride on the Internet until Congress and consumer protection laws wake TF up and do their job.
  • dkonofalski 5y ago
    Is Google unique in that, though? Amazon reviews are worthless now because companies pay customers to leave positive reviews or pay review farms to leave positive reviews. Even if someone reports them to Amazon, though, the companies just close their accounts and open new ones with different names and sell the same product. It's so trivial for them to pivot when they get caught that I'm not sure there is a solution to this problem.
    • winternett 5y ago
      It's not really us who can resolve the issues... I just wrote my own "rant" on the matter and posted it here along with the start to fixing them: Yes, your frustration with the Internet and modern business is real https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350322
    • adamc 5y ago
      There is a perfectly good solution, and some people use it: don't buy from unknown vendors. If you buy a product from one of a few well-known companies in that space, they have a big investment in their brand, and are much less likely to engage in behaviors that might diminish the value of that brand. The price is that you pay more -- effectively, you are paying for that branding. I've had so many bad experiences on Amazon that I am increasingly doing just that. It doesn't apply to everything, but it is a useful strategy.
• dkonofalski 5y ago
  Based on some of the April Fools' Day experiments that Reddit has done in the past, I'm not sure why you wouldn't have the same hesitation and mistrust of Reddit posts and comments. So much of the content, even on Reddit, is made by bots or copied by bots from older, legitimate user-generated content.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• slightwinder 5y ago
  > 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 secretly paid ads. So are reddit-comments and entries. There it's even worse, because most people don't connect the content with manipulation. > The "best" recipe for pancakes is only what's trending on instagram right now. So, like reddit? I mean every platform has their hive mind, and reddit is even worse, because the hive mind can be manipulated with paid upvotes, not just reposting and comments. > The same for trending programmer tools. Aren't most of them yet again commercial products from companies?
  • sbate1987 5y ago
• JimBlackwood 5y ago
  Totally agree on the reddit point, I've also noticed the same occurring to me. The girlfriend recently got Pokemon Arceus and sometimes asks me to Google something she wants to know. It's completely pointless, you just get a bunch of articles from news sites (??) that transcript the quest but not tell you anything more. I miss a nice community wiki like I'm used to from playing Dark Souls etc. I've just started appending site:reddit.com to everything, works a lot better.
  • salt-thrower 5y ago
    Yeah, Fextralife saved my ass multiple times while working through the dark souls series. It's a shame that type of community resource isn't more popular.
  • TimLeland 5y ago
    I've been adding this to my searches for years. Check out this site that will save you a few keystrokes: https://gooreddit.com/ https://gooreddit.com/
    • throwamon 5y ago
      Or you could just add a custom search keyword directly in your browser... https://zapier.com/blog/add-search-engine-to-chrome/ https://zapier.com/blog/add-search-engine-to-chrome/ https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-search-engine-to-firefox/7374#7374 https://superuser.com/questions/7327/how-to-add-a-custom-sea...
• api 5y ago
  I view the Dead Internet Theory as Black Mirror style satire. All it would take is liberal application of GPT-3 style transformer AI to content generation and much of the Internet could be fake. You could have fake political trolls arguing with other fake political trolls from the other side, fake blogs, fake review sites, etc. and it would take me a while to notice. Most of the modern Internet is just that bad. Advertising always creates perverse incentives. It works in traditional media too. Look at what happened to things like Discovery and The Learning Channel when they became subject to advertising based pressure for ratings. They went from having actual educational content to being full of tabloid trash.
• danso 5y ago
  I agree that Reddit remains a good source for info, but I’ve found that Google usually does a good job surfacing Reddit results — usually in the top half. Though this is most notable when I’m googling for esoteric info about TV shows and video games (e.g. “best build mass effect 3”)
• rogy 5y ago
  I didn’t really even think about this properly until just now.. these days I am looking at Reddit, Facebook groups and if needs be, YouTube (videos not by ‘creators’ as far as possible) to find information I used to google. Ads and referral links have totally ruined the usefulness of so much information.
• 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  But I still prefer to use Google to search Reddit or Stack overflow. Reddit especially has horrible search.
• rhino369 5y ago
  >>- "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant" ..." >This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. It should do both. And it used to do both.
• cosmosgenius 5y ago
  The first review site I go to, to find if the product should be trusted or not is reddit only in the hope that not every comment is a paid ad.
• ziml77 5y ago
  The reason that the quality on Reddit is higher is because there’s people moderating those quality subreddits. Without those moderators it would all turn to crap and be just as useless as Google.
  • Klonoar 5y ago
    Moderators that are often anonymous/unknown. (This isn't an argument against your point, just a bit of additional context that increasingly is odd to me as Reddit gains more and more social weight)
    • ziml77 5y ago
      Very true. Fortunately I don't think most moderators want to see their community destroyed. That's exactly what would happen if they started taking money. As a group, people will catch on fast and either force the moderator to step down or just leave for a new subreddit.
• madrox 5y ago
  That inauthenticity comment really hit home for me, too. I realize that I do not trust the internet at large, and haven't for a long time. That's been the real trigger for my retreat from mass social media into smaller, tigher online communities. Even HN is starting to feel like it wants to sell me something.
  • selfhoster11 5y ago
    The latter feeling may be because HN is run by a startup accelerator. They run literal native ads on the front page whenna startup they sponsor goes live.
    • madrox 5y ago
      I don't think that's where it comes from. It comes from the same places as Google, where people know the value of this community's attention. Posts at the top of HN are designed to get to the top of HN.
• samstave 5y ago
  Any idea what reddit's valuation is currently looking like? I have long been surprised they havent been acquired .. I assume for sure they have had plenty of offerss in the past
  • technothrasher 5y ago
    They were acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.
    • samstave 5y ago
      Oh, forgot about that... Thanks Are they still under them? regardless, what is reddit's current value? (I've been on reddit for 15 years - but I have recently deleted my accounts due to censorship and ban-hammering for the most ridiculous reasons.)
  • mardifoufs 5y ago
    They have filed for an IPO last month with the SEC so they should go public very soon. Last valuation was at 10b$ which is ridiculous for a website that can literally get its most popular subreddits shutdown arbitrarily whenever a small group of extremely online volunteer mods decide to "go on strike" by locking the subs because they don't like something/someone else on the website. It happened before and the admins yielded to them so I don't see why it wouldn't happen again, especially since it's not like they can run the website without that weird cabal of (mostly delusional/psychotic) power mods doing their work for free.
    • Lascaille 5y ago
      I've also thought that. The reddit shutdown made the frontpage of (reputable) news sources, I can't imagine that investors aren't going to be asking the admins how much control they really have over the user experience on any given day.
    • samstave 5y ago
      >>is ridiculous for a website that can literally get its most popular subreddits shutdown arbitrarily whenever a small group of extremely online volunteer mods decide to "go on strike" by locking the subs because they don't like something/someone else on the website I have a story about this - and its worse than just mods -- Admins intervene and set narrative on for whom is allowed to mod and make mod decisions... I wont reveal the details - but I have seen Admins literally come in and fuck up Mod orders because (my suspicion) is that the Admins have MANY accounts that /appear/ as mods - but are actually Admin shill accounts... I had this happen to me first hand and I was appalled. Reddit's ethics are absolute garbage in this regard.
• dheera 5y ago
  As soon as Google removed Wikipedia as the first result of everything they started dying.
  • Klonoar 5y ago
    Except Wikipedia has a reliable place on the page, if a Wikipedia entry exists... they never _removed_ it, just _moved_ it. This is the least of the issues with Google.
• mad182 5y ago
  IMHO it's not so much of a problem with google search, but the internet as a whole. Most genuine discussions have moved from open, publicly accessible web to places inaccessible to search engines and general public. Smaller niche forums, blogs and personal websites with no financial incentive have died out. People have moved to Facebook, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack, Twitter and other places behind logins. Online newspapers and portals are increasingly using paywalls. Most of the genuine human interactions and quality content is not indexable anymore. Instead we have a million affiliate marketers fighting for the top positions in search results with every possible seo trick. Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly accessible online discussions.
  • pie_flavor 5y ago
    Feature, not bug. If there's no public search, it can't be gamed for money. The problem TFA identifies is one of discerning that the person you're getting your info from is an actual person, who cares. The best way of doing that, until we find some way of creating institutional trust in these matters, is talking to the sort of person that spends all day in talking to a chat room about whatever it is you're asking about.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    It's because private communities are the only ones free from mass abuse. Public forums moved to private discord groups with hard to find invite links / etc because public forums take an army of anti abuse workers to keep alive. While a discord group just needs a few people to kick the trouble makers and maybe revoke the invite link for a while.
    • throwamon 5y ago
      If that's the entire problem, then why not make these forums read-only by default (while still keeping them publicly viewable) and hand out invite links as in Discord? Lobste.rs, for instance, has an interesting "invite tree" concept where your reputation is bound to people you've invited and who they've invited and so on.
  • chestervonwinch 5y ago
• bradgessler 5y ago
  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 question worth posing to this community: how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers? Secondarily, how can said internet also be much more accessible to content authors so they won’t have to learn a css, html, and JS to publish some stuff? Finally, how can that content be discovered from within this network?
  • throw10920 5y ago
    > how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers? You have to reify "trust" into concrete, computer-representable data. Maybe borrow the "web of trust" concept from PGP, but do some sort of multiplicative thing where the amount you trust someone's recommendation online is the product of the trust relationships between you and the recommender. That's really the best you can do - even legislation against online advertising will be subverted by companies that go through layers of proxies to buy influence.
  • niccl 5y ago
    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?
    • machiaweliczny 5y ago
      Ads will always exist because they work. Only way is to ban them explicitly but you can do that with AdBlock for example but you still get SEO spam, placed content, inauthentic "recommendations".
    • lrem 5y ago
• JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  >Reviews are secretly paid ads. So are a lot of Reddit comments.
• hintymad 5y ago
  > This is it for me exactly. This is for me exactly too. Search "best XXX for YYY", and I get back two pages of dubious websites that smell like paid ads a mile away.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• coolso 5y ago
  > I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. There is so much shilling on Reddit if you knew it would blow your mind. I wish more people realized this. Reddit is the best place to shill because not only is it ridiculously simple, people also automatically assume you’re not shilling, and then once you seed the idea, everyone else will do the shilling for you indirectly. The healthiest way to use Reddit is like Wikipedia: assume the information you’re reading is highly compromised and biased in one way or another, but use it as a starting point in your further research and it’s a great tool. Reddit posts are not your friends. Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling. Reddit is the best place to shill and the sooner the non-shillers figure that out, the better off the entire internet will be.
  • Klonoar 5y ago
    >Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling. I increasingly think that upvote/downvote culture is the worst thing to happen to the internet and the world at large. The problem is I don't have an alternative solution to propose. Your comment is spot-on in my opinion though - I usually start with Reddit results, but try to check against other sources before relying on it.
  • Lascaille 5y ago
    Reddit also - in my opinon - actively enables shilling and botposting. Why do they have an API? A forum that's meant to be 100% about humans talking to humans doesn't need an API, so why does it expose one? Also the model of user-created and user-moderated subreddits actively enables the creation of shill accounts. It's trivial to create a subreddit and use it to farm karma with a ton of bots. If you can keep real users from ever entering your walled garden of a subreddit (of which there are many) your bots will never be detected until you wipe their comment history and set them loose on the rest of the site.
    • hnburnsy 5y ago
      >A forum that's meant to be 100% about humans talking to humans doesn't need an API, so why does it expose one? Third-party clients?
• nvarsj 5y ago
  Yup, when I want to search anything I use a combination of reddit, HN, and Discord. My main use of Google these days is to find a website I forget the name of but roughly know what it's called. In the olden days, I used bookmark aggregation sites like del.icio.us to search for relevant content, which was generally more fruitful than a Google search.
• TrevorJ 5y ago
  I agree. Often, what I am after online is to see what other real people are saying about something. typing 'reddit' into google is basically a proxy for "please google for the love of good, can you start indexing actual human discussions again?".
• kingcharles 5y ago
  > I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible. Nice try. That's totally what a bot would say.
• TheKarateKid 5y ago
  Google could fix this by making the algorithm take into account searches that often end with "reddit", thus applying more weight to Reddit results to similar searches where the user didn't include Reddit in it. Clearly it's an indicator that those are the better results. Take StackOverflow for example. Almost any programmer will find a SO result as the top result and it's usually exactly what you're looking for. Since there's no money to be made by companies writing blog posts on debugging a compiler error, Google's algorithm works as intended. Question is: Why hasn't Google done anything about this? It's the organic results that are terrible, so they're not losing ad revenue by placing these garbage sites at the top. Perhaps its to intentionally make better websites pay for ads to get better placement? But those won't be the ones to ever pay to begin with...
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    I think it would be foolish to assume google hasn't spent hundreds of hours in meetings talking about what they can do about everyone having to type reddit. Problem is they are facing an army of SEO experts who are one step ahead of google. As well as legal issues. Imagine if it was found google was artificially boosting reddit in an unfair way.
    • TheKarateKid 5y ago
      This is Google we're talking about. They could very easily conquer the SEO experts the same way they basically eliminated spam and most web browser exploits.
• smrtinsert 5y ago
  Dead Internet Theory is totally believable. I remember back in 2006-7 or so, being slightly curious about putting up a food review site because I was really angry at my local X food establishment. I found places were you could buy complete restaurant database ready to be scripted onto the web for maybe 90 a pop. The data was actually pretty good, but I was shocked by the huge community around flipping these dbs into internet spam. For the very high majority these were hungry business types who could barely open a code editor without asking for help. I only expect the problem has gotten exponentially worse since then now that ai generated content has improved in quality.
• robbyking 5y ago
  > The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit Are you a fan of r/mtb or r/mountainbiking?
• takeda 5y ago
  >> "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant" ..." > This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. Yeah I remember this being mentioned in a local presentation at university. As a great thing. Google doesn't search for what you write, but what you want. The problem is that very often Google don't know what I want. Before they introduced this, I was able to define my query so that I got exactly what I wanted.
  • userbinator 5y ago
    Google knows what it wants. Its job is to convince you to agree with it.
• jedwhite 5y ago
  There's a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven't! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers. Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has a distribution monopoly through Android, its deal with Apple on iOS and MacOS, and on desktop through Chrome. I'm working on a search engine startup. It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level. And despite being technically possible on desktop with Chrome, it is for all practical purposes beyond what any typical consumer can easily do. Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google and clicking ads.
  • eldaisfish 5y ago
    >Let's be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore Do you have anything substantive to support this? I highly doubt it is true given the fact that the verb "to google" literally means "to search the internet".
    • kahmeal 5y ago
      I think you missed the point here -- people synonymize googling with searching and therefore aren't choosing to google -- they're choosing to search but ending up using google despite having made no conscious effort to do so (it's just there).
    • jedwhite 5y ago
      Google is the default search on the vast majority of phones and desktop browsers by default. People don't change their search engine from something else to Google, because it is already the default search engine on the devices they buy and the web browsers they use. So people do not make a conscious choice to use Google. The vast majority make no choice at all. Google is synonymous with search because it is already the search engine on their phones and computers. They are simply never asked which search engine they want to use. Most consumers have no idea that you can even change your search engine. After talking with hundreds of users, they find it's either impossible to change (iPhone/MacOS) or too hard (Chrome). If you're Duck Duck Go or Bing, at least you're in a very limited dropdown list if someone does want to try something else. If you're a new search engine startup, you're not an option at all.
• flyinghamster 5y ago
  This fits well with my own worldview. I've been griping about Google results for years, and jumped for DuckDuckGo when it became usable. I'm sure that fifteen years from now, DuckDuckGo will be ad-infested crap and someone new will come along to replace it, just as Google replaced AltaVista. Even DDG knows that it can't handle everything, and so it has its bang shortcuts. I've used the !reddit one, and I'd use !w (Wikipedia) except I do those from the Firefox search bar. I've heard the "everything's a bot" theory before, but never saw a name put to it before. I'd have to guess that 99% of all SMTP traffic is spam at this point.
  • cge 5y ago
    >I'm sure that fifteen years from now, DuckDuckGo will be ad-infested crap In terms of direct ads, perhaps. But for SEO spam, in many cases, DDG already seems to be there. For example, things as simple as "python datetime", "python json", or "python datetime.now", where it would seem obvious that the top result would be the documentation for the module/function, have spam sites above the actual Python documentation. Meanwhile, search for "matplotlib", and your screen will fill up with ads.
• acchow 5y ago
  I wish Google would offer two different search products, one assuming Google-fu, and one not.
• wisty 5y ago
  Google's problem is they've virtually nothing (given their resources) to "commoditizing their complement". https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement Google's compliment is web sites. What have they done to make a web site easier to make? They even killed their RSS feed. They have released a bit of web tech, but their offerings are generally a bit sad or only solve Google problems (e.g. Go). If you want to distribute an .exe or .app, MS and Apple have released some pretty good tools to help. If you want to write a blog or make a simple web app, it's unlikely you're going to think "Google has some great stuff to help, and has awesome tools". Mozilla's web resources are better. Microsoft's web resources are better.
  • account42 5y ago
    > If you want to distribute an .exe or .app, MS and Apple have released some pretty good tools to help. You mean having to pay them for the priviledge of not being flagged as "dangerous" by shitty machine learning algorithms?
• nluken 5y ago
  > The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web This point especially rings true for me, but it also concerns me a bit. Reddit has killed a lot of other forums over the years. If something happens to Reddit, we run the risk of losing a large corpus of information.
• shane_b 5y ago
  Makes sense why they would fuzzy search. Not all users can be expected to know Google fu. So let mainstream use fuzzy and keep power user features. The big issue is power user support is gone for people with Google fu. Ads or no ads isn’t really an issue for this because it’s such a small percentage of users that know Google fu.
• Havoc 5y ago
  >Dead Internet Theory Reminds me of the "birds aren't real" theory. Its almost more social commentary than a serious theory
• Angostura 5y ago
  The death of the authentic web really chimes with me. I have an almost physical reaction when I occasionally come across a page that isn’t trying to sell me something, that is a labour of love. A month or so ago, I was trying to help someone retrieve some very old Wordpress for Mac files. I found http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos and was so touched, I sent the author a few dollars for a coffee
• rackjack 5y ago
  Maybe a different kind of terror than Dead Internet Theory: the Internet is "alive", but it acts as if it was dead.
• mastazi 5y ago
  I have a similar habit, I often search "[topic] forum" - I'm not fond of Reddit specifically due to accessibility issues although in some cases I still go there because it's the only good source.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bshoemaker 5y ago
  That's so funny, because I use Google to search reddit, because Google's search of reddit is better than Reddit's.
• orangepurple 5y ago
  More info about the Dead Internet Theory (DIT) https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/ https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-... Archive: https://archive.ph/VoaxV https://archive.ph/VoaxV
• ozim 5y ago
  Google was boiling the frog really really slow. You can still can get exact searches by google dorks but "normal" people might find "google trying to be smart" actually useful.
• littlecranky67 5y ago
  > - "There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory..." > I hadn't heard of this. Now that's some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today's world it seems totally plausible. I never believed in conspiracy theories, and after I read "Media Control" by Noam Chomsky I understood there is no need for conspiracy theories once you understand how individual incentives are aligned and how individuals always act to maximise profits. Someone on HN phrased this and I am not taking credit for it but it explains beautifully whats going on: "Google is not making money by showing you the best search result they can, they make money by keeping you searching."
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    That does not make sense. If searches did not result in satisfactory results, then people would stop searching. Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or Reddit. This is a problem for google, maybe not right this minute as growth might offset dissuaded users, but nevertheless, it does not behoove them in the long run to provide garbage search results to people.
    • littlecranky67 5y ago
      > Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or Reddit. You are right but overestimate the number of people doing these restrictive searches. They should be in the <0.1% range. I personally switched (to duck and latly kagi.com) and know quite some people in tech that did so too, but the non tech-savy person (which are the majority of overall users) doesn't even know other search engines.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Eventually, though, even non technical users will stop Google searching if it wastes their time. If they do not find what they want, then they can go back to asking people in person or instagram or whatever, but I would not expect people to keep aimlessly searching.
• Xeronate 5y ago
  I agree google is bad, but I think reddit is rapidly becoming equally as inauthentic. I'm sure every major player at this point understands the gains that can be had by astroturfing reddit. The real problem seems to be the internet is inherently untrustworthy and going back to finding people you trust in the real world is the only fix I can see.
  • winternett 5y ago
    We've also got to address the people and corporations that are gaming the system that google has created. Google is by no means off the hook, but Marketing practices have also taken a very bad turn to deception and in reinforcing a payola systems recently that we may never be able to recover from trust-wise.
  • moffkalast 5y ago
    Meanwhile you still need Google to search reddit as reddit's built in search remains trash.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  >most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust i think that specialised search engines are gaining ground. For example, I am using github search for searching code samples, that works better than google. You might want to check my side project that tries to explore the subject. I have a search tool / catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators, i am hoping that it allows for better discoverability of specialized search engines. https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html - (best viewed on a PC). The latest addition is a description for each search engine, just hover over the name, and you get a description derived from the sites meta and title tags. I think that specialised search engines are gaining ground, it has become easier to set one up, thanks to elasticsearch/lucene. They can be quite good, for a limited domain, and they don't have to invade your privacy in order to find out what you are looking for. I think that what is missing are tools like this, that would aid the discovery and use of these search engines. I hope that this will allow them to eat into the market from the 'low end'. The projects source is here: https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang https://github.com/mosermichael/duckduckbang Unfortunately they don't invest too much into !bang operators at duckduckgo, however that's my input data...
• jshen 5y ago
  "It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines..." I don’t think this is the problem. The problem is the need for public companies to grow exponentially. If you take away the need to constantly grow exponentially, then ads on search can be both balanced well and make an insane amount of money.
• bambax 5y ago
  I think the OP is weak because it conflates ads and seo spam. Yes, Google went all in with ads, and yes, this hurt its credibility and the quality of its products. But there is no conceivable universe where seo spam isn't the arch enemy of Google. Google needs to fight spam to survive, it knows it and it does. But that's hard. So hard in fact, that nobody else has cracked the problem, and for all the anecdotal evidence of someone switching to Bing, Google's marketshare is still utterly dominant. The Dead Internet Theory may have some weight: Google hasn't dropped the ball, but it is slowly drowning into the sea of "content-free content". But if that's the case, so is everyone else.
  • wilde 5y ago
    SEO is ads Google is failing to monetize. That said, the reason the Reddit trick works is that it uses information Google explicitly excludes when ranking content (engagement signals). Google has a bunch of “objective standards” that it uses to paternalistically shape what the web looks like. Many of these are divorced from what users actually want for pieces of content (https, AMP, a life story in front of recipes to demonstrate authorship, etc).
    • bambax 5y ago
      As explained in another comment [0], the real reason the Reddit trick works is that Reddit content is hand-curated by humans who are dedicated and passionate (and, I think, also work for free). It's a garden in the jungle. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349460
      • wilde 5y ago
        I think our statements overlap. “Reddit moderators have better standards.” Is something I’d definitely agree with.
    • dfreeman85 5y ago
• naravara 5y ago
  I think there’s actually two dimensions to this problem and the article and your comment only address one of them. The other dimension is that, in the past, if you searched for stuff your results were likely to be a blog or a forum thread. Today the bloggers have evolved into instagrammers, TikTokkers, YouTubers, or Podcasters. The Forums and community pages have moved to Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, etc. So it’s not just that SEO and botspam has eaten the Google results page, it’s that this is all that’s left of the open internet that needed search to navigate. Much of it truly is a wasteland. Google owns part of the blame for crippling RSS and privileging recent pages and specific domains or AMP pages over evergreen, self-hosted content in search results. But also users have given up on the open internet in droves. Instead of starting a fansite they start fan subreddits or discords instead.
• astonex 5y ago
  It's perhaps a little bit early in its creation to be sharing this but I am working on a new search that should help to fix the problems mentioned in the article, https://namusearch.com/ https://namusearch.com/. It allows you to build (and share with others) a curated list of websites that you want to use for searches
• thaumasiotes 5y ago
  >> "Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant" ..." > This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write. I hate this too. I do get typos corrected by Google. But I don't need that - if I put a typo in my query and get bad results, I can correct the typo myself. But if Google decides I must not have meant what I actually said, there's no way for me to correct that. It's a ridiculously bad tradeoff - we eliminate errors that are trivially fixed by introducing errors that can't be fixed at all. I have similar feelings about phone input autocorrect, which automatically converts typos that are very easy to read into (mostly) correctly spelled words, plus (sometimes) completely unintelligible nonsense.
• jarrenae 5y ago
  Search Reddit Via Google: https://www.searchbettr.com/ https://www.searchbettr.com/
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  > I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren't trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. Oh my sweet summer child. Reddit is absolutely infested with paid shills.
• itsjustme2 5y ago
  "The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web." I just wanted to mention that a friend of mine made an app for user-reported trail conditions that might be worth taking a look at: https://trekko.app/ https://trekko.app/
• matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. It's only a matter of time before reddit too becomes too inauthentic to trust. Not only is it directly funded by advertising, its audience is mainstream enough for advertisers to invest time and money posting fake opinions in order to make it look like it's coming from real people. I seriously hope I never see comments or news about people appending hacker news to searches. I don't want advertisers to kill this site when they catch wind of it.
• malthuswaswrong 5y ago
  >because results on other sites aren't trustworthy Reddit is gamed way more than google. Paid posters, moderation of anything against a narrative. Google search may be dying, but reddit ain't doing much better.
• irthomasthomas 5y ago
  Google doesn't care about indexing the internet, that's easy. Every other product they have built since search has been about indexing you.
• grndzro 5y ago
  Oh come on you type 15 letters by accident all the time :)