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> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days It feels truly absurd how many queries I need to append "reddit" to get something us

by dahdum 4y ago

> I need to add "reddit" or "stackoverflow" to half my searches these days It feels truly absurd how many queries I need to append "reddit" to get something useful. The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up.

i_am_proteus 4y ago
Of course, SEO blog spammers are learning to add these terms to their sites.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  The problem is they spam the actual forums themselves. I assume all those posts such as “what did buy (for less than $x) that you find most useful” are spammers so they can reply with their own products. And I am sure they are making posts asking for product/restaurant/etc recommendations and then replying to themselves.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I remember encountering this in LinkedIn groups. I had joined a few (like The Swift Programming Language), and would see questions like "I have this problem <Detailed description of the issue>, how can I solve it?" Since (in at least one case) this was a problem I had easily solved, years before, I would provide a detailed, concise, answer, showing how to deal with it in a few lines of code. My answer would get ignored. Instead all these replies would show up, saying things like "I added the <XXX Library>, and it solved the problem!". These would get voted up, and the original poster would actually engage them. After seeing a few of these, I realized that LI groups are dumpster fires, and quit them all.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  As long as "site:" still works (limiting your search scope to a particular domain), then the SEO'ers can pound sand. Pretty much 100% of my google searches these days are scoped to a particular domain. This is because my search needs in 202x are very different than in 200x. Back then, I wanted to find the right web site for X. Today, I know the best web sites for X, and I always want to search for that exact X on that exact site. I am no longer interested in discovering new web sites. The established ones are known to be good, and any new, unknown one is almost 99.9999% likely to be SEO spam. For example, I'm not interested in Dropshipper 45512's automatically generated web store where he gets a commission to ship you Alibaba goods, and that's really all you get in the long tail of shopping searches. Search engines need to pivot away from helping people find new web sites (since they are mostly crap) and instead help to curate the best content from existing known-good ones. Yes, it sucks if your new site is legitimitely one of the 0.0001% that are human-made and awesome. Sorry, but I'm not going to find you through search. Don't worry, I'll find you through word of mouth if you are actually high quality.
  - yellowsir 4y ago
    have you considert duckduckgo with bangs? I use them daily e.g. `!so <query>` would search on stack overflow. U can use `!g` if you ever need google again.
Phrenzy 4y ago
YouTube search is even worse. They could do so much to filter the results. But they don't. They don't even give you a full page of results. The give you half a dozen and go "Meh. Search is hard. Here is some completely unrelated videos you might like."
- Xelbair 4y ago
  to properly search youtube, you have to use google with "site:youtube.com"....
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    But how long until youtube comments and reddit posts are filled with plausible content made by SEO spammers using ChatGPT?
    - capableweb 4y ago
      Since the API was released, guaranteed. No place is safe.
- rnmkr 4y ago
  I fucking hate YouTube now. 3 or 4 results at best, rest of the page is completely unrelated junk wtf.
- imbnwa 4y ago
  They have the abitity to create transcripts of everything on there, across languages, with the capability to apply good-enough translations to other languages, its insane
- cobertos 4y ago
  I think this is intentional. Those videos for me (unrelated videos to my search) are usually recommended videos and it feels like they are placed there to get you to engage. When I use search on NewPipe, I get _much_ better results, and those unrelated videos don't show up, presumably because those searches don't use a Google account. I get much better results when I search on NewPipe, and have found some great videos from the normal YouTube frontend search
cma 4y ago
Why do they rank reddit so low be default? Does reddit not run stuff from their ad networks?
- Rumudiez 4y ago
  Large page sizes, short session times, and I’m sure a myriad other things help reddit earn that low ranking all by themselves. Serving up google ads doesn’t help with seo
Alupis 4y ago
This makes me laugh - I've found myself appending "reddit" to my search queries more and more frequently when looking for product or service reviews. The regular google results are filled with affiliate-link-driven ads disguised as product reviews. If you want to really know what people think about products, you have to go digging these days.
- ilostmyshoes 4y ago
  I do the same and even then you need to be careful about the astroturfing on reddit corporatism is everywhere and infecting the web to enrich a few at the expense of everyone else
  - malfist 4y ago
    Yeah, this suggestion still works okay. It used to work better, but now the advertisers have caught on. I give it another year or two before corporations have astroturffed the hell out of site:reddit.com searches and made them useless
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pixl97 4y ago
  >I've found myself appending "reddit" to my search queries So what you're saying is I should create dedicated subreddits about my products that only allow my multitude of bot accounts to post to it, but look like real conversations?
  - Quenty 4y ago
    This is why a lot of younger people just search stuff on tiktok.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Not 100% sure how that solves the situation.
jrockway 4y ago
I keep hearing about adding reddit to one's search queries, but what sort of things are y'all searching for where reddit's opinion is relevant? Reddit is kind of like that effect that people say about popular journalism; for the things that you're an expert on, they always get it wrong, but for things you know nothing about, they have a way of sounding right. Reddit is very much like that for me; if I know nothing about something, I love the comments. If I know a lot about something, it's all too crazy to even read. (I stopped reading programming subreddits like 15 years ago. A lot of very mean wrong people hanging out there.)
- gymbeaux 4y ago
  There’s a lot of useful stuff on Reddit but you do have to be careful as “upvoted” stuff is sometimes wrong and “downvoted” stuff is sometimes right. My bigger issue with it is that volunteer-mods are often power-hungry and ban people who they disagree with or who hurt their feelings. Reddit is a social experiment, and the result is humans are still trash to each other when they’re anonymous.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    > There’s a lot of useful stuff on Reddit but you do have to be careful as “upvoted” stuff is sometimes wrong and “downvoted” stuff is sometimes right. Default subs and big subs are by far the worst about this. Comments in threads on r/technology for example frequently perpetuates easily verifiable falsehoods that would quickly get shot down in smaller communities.
  - bdw5204 4y ago
    I have a suspicion that the "volunteer-mods" on the big Reddits, like the Wikipedia admins, are infiltrated by people paid by interested parties to represent their interests on those popular web sites. In the case of Wikipedia, I recall a story about how one of their admins was a woman in Canada who was a former British intelligence agent with whatever the British equivalent of the CIA is called. If governments and NGOs can infiltrate Wikipedia to do things that are specifically against its rules, they can infiltrate Reddit and probably have. Most people are too busy to have the time to be an online moderator and those who have the time typically don't have the political skills to get appointed as a moderator of a large online community. That's why the best way to hire a good mod for your online community is to make it a paid position and to randomly monitor them for evidence of bias and/or abuse of power.
rdudek 4y ago
The problem is the spammers are already creating garbage content on Reddit as well. Fortunately, the moderators of the big subreddits will usually take care of it and remove the posts, but some of the smaller / niche ones still leave things up there.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  IME the mods for the big subreddits are the worst, as they constantly power trip/enforce their opinions.
MattDemers 4y ago
> The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up. I'd argue that Google incentivized the web to change in a way in order to better exploit/profit from Google, and that's led to a net negative experience for Google users (who then leave, causing problems for Google).
roody15 4y ago
Is it "Google hasn't kept up"… or perhaps it’s by design. I wonder if google has more interest in showing users what it wants to show them vs what we end users may be looking for. At least for me I see this blatantly when using YouTube. It gives about 2-5 decent search results .. followed by a list not even remotely close to my search.
2devnull 4y ago
I’m not sure I understand the assumption that Reddit can serve up better/safer info than google. It’s pretty trivial to post misinformation, malicious advice and so forth on Reddit. And how many times do I pull up stackoverflow with a question with one answer and few if any votes. Often the single answer is unreliable, and if trusted blindly I could see that being a serious risk. You know, the answer is “just run: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda” or the classic “rm -rf c:”

by dahdum 4y ago

i_am_proteus 4y ago

Of course, SEO blog spammers are learning to add these terms to their sites.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
The problem is they spam the actual forums themselves. I assume all those posts such as “what did buy (for less than $x) that you find most useful” are spammers so they can reply with their own products. And I am sure they are making posts asking for product/restaurant/etc recommendations and then replying to themselves.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I remember encountering this in LinkedIn groups. I had joined a few (like The Swift Programming Language), and would see questions like "I have this problem <Detailed description of the issue>, how can I solve it?" Since (in at least one case) this was a problem I had easily solved, years before, I would provide a detailed, concise, answer, showing how to deal with it in a few lines of code. My answer would get ignored. Instead all these replies would show up, saying things like "I added the <XXX Library>, and it solved the problem!". These would get voted up, and the original poster would actually engage them. After seeing a few of these, I realized that LI groups are dumpster fires, and quit them all.
ryandrake 4y ago
As long as "site:" still works (limiting your search scope to a particular domain), then the SEO'ers can pound sand. Pretty much 100% of my google searches these days are scoped to a particular domain. This is because my search needs in 202x are very different than in 200x. Back then, I wanted to find the right web site for X. Today, I know the best web sites for X, and I always want to search for that exact X on that exact site. I am no longer interested in discovering new web sites. The established ones are known to be good, and any new, unknown one is almost 99.9999% likely to be SEO spam. For example, I'm not interested in Dropshipper 45512's automatically generated web store where he gets a commission to ship you Alibaba goods, and that's really all you get in the long tail of shopping searches. Search engines need to pivot away from helping people find new web sites (since they are mostly crap) and instead help to curate the best content from existing known-good ones. Yes, it sucks if your new site is legitimitely one of the 0.0001% that are human-made and awesome. Sorry, but I'm not going to find you through search. Don't worry, I'll find you through word of mouth if you are actually high quality.
- yellowsir 4y ago
  have you considert duckduckgo with bangs? I use them daily e.g. `!so <query>` would search on stack overflow. U can use `!g` if you ever need google again.

Phrenzy 4y ago

YouTube search is even worse. They could do so much to filter the results. But they don't. They don't even give you a full page of results. The give you half a dozen and go "Meh. Search is hard. Here is some completely unrelated videos you might like."

Xelbair 4y ago
to properly search youtube, you have to use google with "site:youtube.com"....
- csdvrx 4y ago
  But how long until youtube comments and reddit posts are filled with plausible content made by SEO spammers using ChatGPT?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Since the API was released, guaranteed. No place is safe.
rnmkr 4y ago
I fucking hate YouTube now. 3 or 4 results at best, rest of the page is completely unrelated junk wtf.
imbnwa 4y ago
They have the abitity to create transcripts of everything on there, across languages, with the capability to apply good-enough translations to other languages, its insane
cobertos 4y ago
I think this is intentional. Those videos for me (unrelated videos to my search) are usually recommended videos and it feels like they are placed there to get you to engage. When I use search on NewPipe, I get _much_ better results, and those unrelated videos don't show up, presumably because those searches don't use a Google account. I get much better results when I search on NewPipe, and have found some great videos from the normal YouTube frontend search

cma 4y ago

Why do they rank reddit so low be default? Does reddit not run stuff from their ad networks?

Rumudiez 4y ago
Large page sizes, short session times, and I’m sure a myriad other things help reddit earn that low ranking all by themselves. Serving up google ads doesn’t help with seo

Alupis 4y ago

This makes me laugh - I've found myself appending "reddit" to my search queries more and more frequently when looking for product or service reviews. The regular google results are filled with affiliate-link-driven ads disguised as product reviews. If you want to really know what people think about products, you have to go digging these days.

ilostmyshoes 4y ago
I do the same and even then you need to be careful about the astroturfing on reddit corporatism is everywhere and infecting the web to enrich a few at the expense of everyone else
- malfist 4y ago
  Yeah, this suggestion still works okay. It used to work better, but now the advertisers have caught on. I give it another year or two before corporations have astroturffed the hell out of site:reddit.com searches and made them useless
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pixl97 4y ago
>I've found myself appending "reddit" to my search queries So what you're saying is I should create dedicated subreddits about my products that only allow my multitude of bot accounts to post to it, but look like real conversations?
- Quenty 4y ago
  This is why a lot of younger people just search stuff on tiktok.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Not 100% sure how that solves the situation.

jrockway 4y ago

I keep hearing about adding reddit to one's search queries, but what sort of things are y'all searching for where reddit's opinion is relevant? Reddit is kind of like that effect that people say about popular journalism; for the things that you're an expert on, they always get it wrong, but for things you know nothing about, they have a way of sounding right. Reddit is very much like that for me; if I know nothing about something, I love the comments. If I know a lot about something, it's all too crazy to even read. (I stopped reading programming subreddits like 15 years ago. A lot of very mean wrong people hanging out there.)

gymbeaux 4y ago
There’s a lot of useful stuff on Reddit but you do have to be careful as “upvoted” stuff is sometimes wrong and “downvoted” stuff is sometimes right. My bigger issue with it is that volunteer-mods are often power-hungry and ban people who they disagree with or who hurt their feelings. Reddit is a social experiment, and the result is humans are still trash to each other when they’re anonymous.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  > There’s a lot of useful stuff on Reddit but you do have to be careful as “upvoted” stuff is sometimes wrong and “downvoted” stuff is sometimes right. Default subs and big subs are by far the worst about this. Comments in threads on r/technology for example frequently perpetuates easily verifiable falsehoods that would quickly get shot down in smaller communities.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  I have a suspicion that the "volunteer-mods" on the big Reddits, like the Wikipedia admins, are infiltrated by people paid by interested parties to represent their interests on those popular web sites. In the case of Wikipedia, I recall a story about how one of their admins was a woman in Canada who was a former British intelligence agent with whatever the British equivalent of the CIA is called. If governments and NGOs can infiltrate Wikipedia to do things that are specifically against its rules, they can infiltrate Reddit and probably have. Most people are too busy to have the time to be an online moderator and those who have the time typically don't have the political skills to get appointed as a moderator of a large online community. That's why the best way to hire a good mod for your online community is to make it a paid position and to randomly monitor them for evidence of bias and/or abuse of power.

rdudek 4y ago

The problem is the spammers are already creating garbage content on Reddit as well. Fortunately, the moderators of the big subreddits will usually take care of it and remove the posts, but some of the smaller / niche ones still leave things up there.

Akronymus 4y ago
IME the mods for the big subreddits are the worst, as they constantly power trip/enforce their opinions.

MattDemers 4y ago

> The web has changed but Google isn't keeping up. I'd argue that Google incentivized the web to change in a way in order to better exploit/profit from Google, and that's led to a net negative experience for Google users (who then leave, causing problems for Google).

roody15 4y ago

Is it "Google hasn't kept up"… or perhaps it’s by design. I wonder if google has more interest in showing users what it wants to show them vs what we end users may be looking for. At least for me I see this blatantly when using YouTube. It gives about 2-5 decent search results .. followed by a list not even remotely close to my search.

2devnull 4y ago

I’m not sure I understand the assumption that Reddit can serve up better/safer info than google. It’s pretty trivial to post misinformation, malicious advice and so forth on Reddit. And how many times do I pull up stackoverflow with a question with one answer and few if any votes. Often the single answer is unreliable, and if trusted blindly I could see that being a serious risk. You know, the answer is “just run: sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda” or the classic “rm -rf c:”