3 ms·

There was a post, which trended on HN yesterday (2000+ upvotes) that stated Reddit is sitting on a gold mine and they can build a better search engine because p

by rukshn 5y ago

There was a post, which trended on HN yesterday (2000+ upvotes) that stated Reddit is sitting on a gold mine and they can build a better search engine because people are appending 'reddit' at the end of it. This is a response to the original post, explaining why the logic behind is it false.

zuminator 5y ago
Frankly I don't really see the logic. You're failing to disambiguate "generally better" with "better for Reddit inc" or "better for redditors," which are all separate things. That is, I'm not convinced that a Reddit search engine would necessarily be subject to the same level of gaming, for a variety of reasons: * Reddit groups are moderated in a way that "THE INTERNET" as a whole isn't. * Reddit is a destination in itself. It's not like Google, which is a means to arrive at various destinations. * A Reddit search engine just has to index Reddit. It can do things like entirely filter out clickable external links, which would make SEO much less fruitful. * Reddit is dependent on being an effective conversational watercooler. For financial reasons, it's not going to allow itself to become filled with the same level of cruft as the entire web is. This is somewhat evidenced by the difference between Reddit and Usenet. Compared with how Usenet quickly devolved into an unmanageable morass with the advent of spam, Reddit has managed to stay fairly legible. (BTW off topic but personally I think this whole post could've just been a comment subthread in the original post. Of course we all want our ideas to bubble to the top. But if everybody started a whole new thread every time they thought they had something REALLY IMPORTANT to say that shouldn't be ignored, then every large thread would give birth to dozens of baby threads and make HN less effective overall. On the other hand, I see someone else thanked you for putting this in a separate "breakout room" so to speak, so what do I know? Cheers.)
- adrianwaj 5y ago
  Perhaps Disqus is a destination site too and no one has realized it yet? It's like a distributed reddit and individual site owners could agree to have their content pulled into a main site, eg via rss or meta tags. Human moderation has value and there was a time when Google let users curate their results.
m-i-l 5y ago
@rukshn Thanks for your post. Personally I'm not convinced by the idea of adding site:reddit.com to your Google search query either, not just because it will get gamed by SEO practitioners as you suggest, but also because there's a lot more to the internet than reddit and a lot of great content hidden away which isn't on reddit. I also believe that a more general solution to better search is both to reward informational sites and also to penalise advertising sites - that's why I built a search engine with a PageRank-style algorthim which also detects result pages containing adverts and heavily downranks them.
- Finnucane 5y ago
  Sure, there are still single-topic forums that are much better for those subjects than Reddit, you just have to know about them.

by rukshn 5y ago

zuminator 5y ago

Frankly I don't really see the logic. You're failing to disambiguate "generally better" with "better for Reddit inc" or "better for redditors," which are all separate things. That is, I'm not convinced that a Reddit search engine would necessarily be subject to the same level of gaming, for a variety of reasons: * Reddit groups are moderated in a way that "THE INTERNET" as a whole isn't. * Reddit is a destination in itself. It's not like Google, which is a means to arrive at various destinations. * A Reddit search engine just has to index Reddit. It can do things like entirely filter out clickable external links, which would make SEO much less fruitful. * Reddit is dependent on being an effective conversational watercooler. For financial reasons, it's not going to allow itself to become filled with the same level of cruft as the entire web is. This is somewhat evidenced by the difference between Reddit and Usenet. Compared with how Usenet quickly devolved into an unmanageable morass with the advent of spam, Reddit has managed to stay fairly legible. (BTW off topic but personally I think this whole post could've just been a comment subthread in the original post. Of course we all want our ideas to bubble to the top. But if everybody started a whole new thread every time they thought they had something REALLY IMPORTANT to say that shouldn't be ignored, then every large thread would give birth to dozens of baby threads and make HN less effective overall. On the other hand, I see someone else thanked you for putting this in a separate "breakout room" so to speak, so what do I know? Cheers.)

adrianwaj 5y ago
Perhaps Disqus is a destination site too and no one has realized it yet? It's like a distributed reddit and individual site owners could agree to have their content pulled into a main site, eg via rss or meta tags. Human moderation has value and there was a time when Google let users curate their results.

m-i-l 5y ago

@rukshn Thanks for your post. Personally I'm not convinced by the idea of adding site:reddit.com to your Google search query either, not just because it will get gamed by SEO practitioners as you suggest, but also because there's a lot more to the internet than reddit and a lot of great content hidden away which isn't on reddit. I also believe that a more general solution to better search is both to reward informational sites and also to penalise advertising sites - that's why I built a search engine with a PageRank-style algorthim which also detects result pages containing adverts and heavily downranks them.

Finnucane 5y ago
Sure, there are still single-topic forums that are much better for those subjects than Reddit, you just have to know about them.