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I can’t this article seriously: > Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. What’s the c

I can’t this article seriously: > Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. What’s the connection between Reddit being searched for and Google dying? Read the article, doesn’t make sense. Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where many projects have community discussions. People are always saying Google is dying or search results are getting worse. How many sites existed in 2010? How many in 2022? How prevalent was SEO and content marketing then vs now. The fact of the matter is that the web itself is becoming more littered with spam. Literally on HN there was a thread on how to make 50K a year and one person proudly stated they did so by using GPT-3 to create spam related to content they were selling. Inherently any search engine with programmatic results can be gamed programmatically. The chart in the article is easily explained by the fact that it’s hard to search those platforms using Google and that the internal search is more useful. Reddit search has always sucked.

Jweb_Guru 5y ago
Honestly, I would blame Discord for Google's inability to return good results as much as anything else, a bunch of the new "authentic" discussion has moved there and other non-indexable platforms.
foxfluff 5y ago
> What’s the connection between Reddit being searched for and Google dying? Google returns page after page of seo garbage. You often have more luck finding what you want on reddit. > Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where many projects have community discussions. The point is that a good search engine would find the result you want without requiring you to go out of your way to specify the site on which you're likely to find that result. It gets worse when you think that these reddit results often provide links to what you want on the web. Somehow google can't do that.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  > The point is that a good search engine would find the result you want without requiring you to go out of your way to specify the site on which you're likely to find that result. It gets worse when you think that these reddit results often provide links to what you want on the web. Somehow google can't do that. This seems too handwavey - what concrete metrics would you use to evaluate the quality of a search engine? Reddit has even more garbage than Google. The only difference is that people can say so on there, unlike on Google. Reddit search doesn’t even do basic spell correction. https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone Hence people use Google to search Reddit.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    > This seems too handwavey - what concrete metrics would you use to evaluate the quality of a search engine? How about the metric in TFA? > Reddit has even more garbage than Google. Well, people disagree, and that's why they're searching reddit all the time now. > Reddit search doesn’t even do basic spell correction. You are missing the point.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      You’re missing the point - a popular sites own lack of internal search would explain the use of external search. The metric in the article does really define search results nor has it been used with other providers as well. I’d love to not use Bing/Google but no one has shown me something better.
      - foxfluff 5y ago
        > You’re missing the point - a popular sites own lack of internal search would explain the use of external search. Sigh. The point is that 1) Google gives trash results by default 2) users know there are good results out there on the web, in particular on reddit 3) people append reddit to their google search query and suddenly good results start popping up 4) if google search wasn't trash by default, people would get good results without having to specifically direct the engine to reddit.

Jweb_Guru 5y ago

Honestly, I would blame Discord for Google's inability to return good results as much as anything else, a bunch of the new "authentic" discussion has moved there and other non-indexable platforms.

foxfluff 5y ago

> What’s the connection between Reddit being searched for and Google dying? Google returns page after page of seo garbage. You often have more luck finding what you want on reddit. > Might as well say that GitHub is dying because Discord is where many projects have community discussions. The point is that a good search engine would find the result you want without requiring you to go out of your way to specify the site on which you're likely to find that result. It gets worse when you think that these reddit results often provide links to what you want on the web. Somehow google can't do that.

endisneigh 5y ago
> The point is that a good search engine would find the result you want without requiring you to go out of your way to specify the site on which you're likely to find that result. It gets worse when you think that these reddit results often provide links to what you want on the web. Somehow google can't do that. This seems too handwavey - what concrete metrics would you use to evaluate the quality of a search engine? Reddit has even more garbage than Google. The only difference is that people can say so on there, unlike on Google. Reddit search doesn’t even do basic spell correction. https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone https://www.reddit.com/search?q=Apple%20ophone Hence people use Google to search Reddit.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  > This seems too handwavey - what concrete metrics would you use to evaluate the quality of a search engine? How about the metric in TFA? > Reddit has even more garbage than Google. Well, people disagree, and that's why they're searching reddit all the time now. > Reddit search doesn’t even do basic spell correction. You are missing the point.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    You’re missing the point - a popular sites own lack of internal search would explain the use of external search. The metric in the article does really define search results nor has it been used with other providers as well. I’d love to not use Bing/Google but no one has shown me something better.
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      > You’re missing the point - a popular sites own lack of internal search would explain the use of external search. Sigh. The point is that 1) Google gives trash results by default 2) users know there are good results out there on the web, in particular on reddit 3) people append reddit to their google search query and suddenly good results start popping up 4) if google search wasn't trash by default, people would get good results without having to specifically direct the engine to reddit.