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Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
- acters 3y agoThis is the biggest benefit reddit provided to the user base. Google search has been lackluster and appending the word reddit allowed me to see plenty of good anecdotal and informative focused discussions without fluffing up the content for SEO.
- bagacrap 3y agoPlenty of paid content on the mattress subs and I'm sure many others
- dumpsterlid 3y ago[dead]
- ramraj07 3y agoYes but easier to navigate. It’s obviously the red queen hypothesis of a never ending game between marketers and users looking for unadulterated information.
- rchaud 3y agoRule of thumb: if they advertise on podcasts, they're astroturfing on Reddit too.
- blovescoffee 3y agoMattress subs?
- luckman212 3y agowas going to ask the same question...
- ekanes 3y agoMattresses have ridiculous margins, so astroturfing is likely.
- bagacrap 3y agoAll I know is I tried to use reddit for mattress recommendations and found it worse than useless.
- bloqs 3y agoBaby with the bathwater. The paid shills are typically obvious and do not survive proper cross-thread analysis
- mrguyorama 3y agoIt's hilarious that you think that
- bloqs 3y agoFriendly reminder that this isn't reddit, and responding like it is won't improve this sites health. Refute the opinion, or add something of value, instead of simply sneering.
- ramraj07 3y agoI actually started going directly to the Reddit app and finding the relevant subreddit and searching within it - hope Reddit realizes the gold mine it’s sitting on but I doubt it.
- DistractionRect 3y agoI've found reddit first party search to be pretty lack luster. More often than not, I'd have to fallback to Googling "site:reddit.com/r/subreddit-of-interest <terms>" and while better, that's about a 50/50 a lot of the time. Reddit does this thing where it advertises other threads on the same page of whatever you're viewing. So sometimes the promoted content was the thing actually relevant to the search and not the current thread. And this would be fine except it's not static/deterministic. The promoted content usually changes between when it's indexed and when it's accessed at a later time - so the thing that made it relevant to the search often isn't there anymore. So you have to either view the cached paged if available, go back and try different results, or refine your search.
- klondike_klive 3y agoThanks for the tip. I'll try this next time I'm about to spend ten minutes searching for some After Effects effect or shortcut.
- senttoschool 3y ago>hope Reddit realizes the gold mine it’s sitting on but I doubt it. They do now and the first thing they want to do is to sell their content to AI labs for millions/year.
- deafpolygon 3y agoDon't worry - it knows. Reddit wants to extract the value asap. I'm pretty sure they're looking to liquidate Reddit and go big on AI.
- ideamotor 3y agoI think data harvesting for AI is the real reason Twitter and Reddit want to limit access. Even I was thinking how easy it would be to mine both sites. It sucks because that’s the end of the (quasi) open web.
- borg16 3y agoI used to think I might be the only one who does this and was beginning to wonder if I am overly reliant on reddit for my search results. Looks like I was not the only one.
- paulddraper 3y agoI find myself doing that. Reddit GitHub Stackoverflow Even Hacker News Quality goes way way up depending on topic. I kinda wish Google would apply some more personalized ML to my searches
- hedora 3y agoI use duck duck go, and haven’t had to resort to that. Anyway, I can’t think of any searches where appending stuff like that wouldn’t be universally beneficial (or detrimental), so I don’t see the personalization angle.
- Osiris 3y agoThey just use Bing user the hood and the results are awful. I use some browsers that default to Bing/DuckDuckGo and every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away. Bing seems to surface a lot more unrelated or spam my websites at the top of the results.
- 8organicbits 3y agoWhat searches are you seeing that with? I default to DDG and when I can't find something I'll try Google, but usually struggle there too. Google also has ads (for people without ad block...) so "unrelated spam at the top" is baked in.
- reportgunner 3y agoSounds like a layer 8 issue, I have been using ddg as my main search engine and I always find what I need on the first page. Every time I stumble in to google I am appalled at how bad the UX is.
- carlmr 3y agoI'd suggest a different explanation. Think about what OP said here for a second: >every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away If you assume both Google and Bing to be similarly good but not the same, then you would expect this to happen. Say there are two sets of websites, the ones that Bing finds (B+) and some that it doesn't (B-). The same would hold for Google, there would be G+ and G-. Now if you search on Bing first, and find what you need, you stop. This is a result in B+. If you don't find it, your result is in B-. Then you search in Google and maybe get a G+ result, since they have different sets of websites they find. You might also not find it (G-) but in the end both search engines aren't that bad, so this rarely happens. Now you might find the same result if you start on Google instead, and aren't lucky in the first go, and then try Bing.
- pcurve 3y agoyup. Without the 'reddit' suffix, the search quality is borderline garbage.
- _8j50 3y agoI see people say this all the time, can you give me an example of your search queries? I never had to search reddit specific stuff but I do add 'github' all the time.
- Zircom 3y agoWhenever my partner and I watch a movie we enjoyed we'll search up threads for it on Reddit because there's always people discussing recommendations of similar films, or at least movies that people who enjoyed the other film liked as well, to add to our backlog. Works especially great for horror movies, for us at least. I don't always quite understand why I may have vibed so well with a particular horror film since they can be so hit-or-miss between individuals, but other people who are more genre-savvy will be in the comments to explain it to me and have some great recommendations :)
- cartermatic 3y agoI've been searching for a new camera to buy. Rather than reading general reviews from blogs where I don't know if they're sponsored or not through a Google search, I was searching "Fujifilm x-h2s review reddit" or "best camera under $2000 reddit" on Google instead. I've found a lot of the time, it can be hard to tell if a blog post from a Google search has actually used the product, or is just keyword spamming and hoping for a referral fee. Especially if I'm looking to buy something in an area I'm not familiar with and don't know the trusted review sites yet. Granted this can still happen on Reddit but I assume it is rarer. I've also found that if I search for something directly on Reddit, I get all sorts of results. Some related, some tangential. And a lot of the time there's porn or NSFW content mixed in.
- badpun 3y agoIf I see a referral link in any kind of advisory/review article, I immediately assume the whole website is a low-effort, no-ethics attempt at making money, and not much else. There are very few exceptions to that rule, where it's fairly obvious that the site is doing fairly extensive testing or research and not just spamming with chatGPT-like platitutes.
- 3y ago
- klyonrad 3y agoso basically (cheap) human content moderation helps against SEO
- harimau777 3y agoUnless you happen to already know of a specialized forum for a topic, it increasingly feels like Reddit and Wikipedia are the only parts of the internet that are still valuable; everything else is content farms or SEO spam. Even then I'm finding that Wikipedia's quality has dropped dramatically in recent years. As they become more zealous about only including "encyclopedic information", I'm increasingly finding pages that have had all of their useful information sucked out of them.
- b112 3y agoeverything else is content farms or SEO spam. No! The rest of the content is still there, loads of it. Google simple has stopped caring, no it is not "too hard", they just don't care enough. Case in point, Google even aids in crappy results, by aliasing your search terms, preventing precision, putting monetization above all else. Google sucks. SEO/spam is not worse, Google is, they know it, they do not care, because so far it has no affected profit negatively.
- harimau777 3y agoGood point. Do you find that other search engines like Kagi resolve the issue?
- b112 3y agoI tried Kagi and liked it. I also find using 'verbatim' searches on Google helps, although that seems to be broken more and more often.
- Eisenstein 3y agoBrave search is better than Google or bing or duckduckgo, I find. About equivalent to kagi.
- ColinHayhurst 3y agoFor alternatives to Google here is a graphical network of web search engines and proxies: https://www.searchenginemap.com/ https://www.searchenginemap.com/ (desktop display only)
- anenefan 3y agoI don't do reddit much, so unless the results in google are inaccessible while the blackout is ongoing, this won't affect google's ability to serve the same results as it did last week.
- marcellus23 3y agoYes, the results are inaccessible during the blackout.
- KptMarchewa 3y agoNot really, Google cache works.
- DANmode 3y agoDon't tell the PE guys about archive.org and .is, either.
- optionalsquid 3y agoNeither Google cache nor archive.org/etc. covers all pages. I've been running into that problem a fair few times
- nashashmi 3y agoHow do you get the cache?
- tafath 3y agothis extension [1] can retrieve cache from various sources, including google. 1 https://github.com/dessant/web-archives https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
- grumbel 3y agoThree dots next to the search result in Google, than in the "About this result" window there is a little "Cached" link right at the bottom. That "Cached" link is however missing for a lot of results.
- tedunangst 3y agoAre reddit posts not archived or cached anywhere?
- Rebelgecko 3y agoI've been using the cached version in the Google search results. It doesn't always work but I've had good luck with reddit during the blackout
- nmeagent 3y agoI've been doing a bit of this as well. Unfortunately, it seems that Google hides the 'Cached' link on mobile devices (at least in Safari) unless you 'request' the desktop version of the search results page. I don't know why they do this; it's extremely obnoxious. But then again, this kind of obtuse nonsense is par for the course these days.
- nashashmi 3y agoBrowser dev and minimalism go together
- lyu07282 3y agoAnother annoying example, Chrome on desktop shows you download speed, on android they don't.
- vacillator 3y agoI simply prefix `cache:` to the URL and that brings up the cached page for me. Of course this will only work if your default search engine is Google.
- foresto 3y agoThey were being archived by pushshift.io until Reddit cut off their API access. Pushshift's API stopped returning results around that time. It looks like Reddit is going to let them resume, but with access restricted to Reddit moderators: https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancing_communityled_moderation_an_update_on/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin... Other sites, like archive.org and Google, scrape and archive Reddit pages, but coverage is spotty at best.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ectospheno 3y agoNot sure why google should get a pass on the reddit blackout. Ublock: google.*###rso .MjjYud a[href*="reddit.com"]:upward(.MjjYud)
- arcanemachiner 3y agoYeah, no thanks. Those old threads contain some of the only remaining quality content for like half of my queries.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chatmasta 3y agoYeah but the point is that the subreddit blackout means you can't actually view the threads. The best you can do is hope that Google Cache has a readable version of it. And the longer the blackout goes on, the more likely it is that the results will be purged from the SERPs anyway, since they're now just an error page instead of relevant content.
- cptMayhem 3y agoI've been using web archive to open reddit links. It's a bit of a hassle, but it's often less of a hassle than trying to find that information somewhere else.
- narrator 3y agoJust use Yandex.com already. It's like Google search from 15 years ago.
- ge96 3y agoIt has good reverse image search
- sh34r 3y agoAh, I'm not the only one. Even duckduckgo has been corrupted by censorship and DMCA abuse.
- solarkraft 3y agoFor some reason I don't trust them that much anymore since the beginning of last year
- savandriy 3y agono thanks
- InCityDreams 3y agoYandex, I just use for 'spicier' content...they can have my sordid thoughts. Amazing how many .com companies are on there with a lot of Russian sub-content.
- newoldhead 3y agouse a searx instance. can aggregate search from almost any relatively known search engine and bypasses tracking.
- mu53 3y agoMonopolization effects from social networks is so powerful. I really wish decentralization would take off again, but it's a vicious cycle. Search incentives SEO hacking. SEO hacking causes searches engines to stick to weigh reputation scores more. Reputation scores favor large social media platforms that have strong moderation practices. Quora, reddit, and other platforms become more valuable than SEO hacked blog spam.
- binkHN 3y ago> Quora This has to be one of these most useless sites on the Internet and it blows my mind how frequently the content from this site is exposed via Google search. Now that I think about it, I think I should probably just block it on my local DNS server.
- bicx 3y agoI hate how easy it is to get confused about what content on the page is even related to the original question. I have to get into my “Quora mindset” where I’m constantly double-checking that I’m not reading the response to a different random question injected into the original page.
- binkHN 3y agoI gave up on Quora! I don't even bother looking at all anymore. If Google gave me the ability to block certain sites from my search results, this would be at the top of my list.
- ciropantera 3y ago> If Google gave me the ability to block certain sites from my search results uBlacklist?
- mdekkers 3y agoKagi does, and in any caee Kagi rarely shows Quora results
- pharmakom 3y agoGoogle should buy Reddit and run it like a non profit, keep the users happy. But also they can use it for LLM training and put it into the Google index.
- argulane 3y agoThey would probably suht it down after few years.
- ChoGGi 3y agoGoogle groups and Google+ say hi
- function_seven 3y agoThey say hi, I Wave back. Man, those were the days.
- devilbunny 3y agoWave was the way my group of friends watched LOST. Even though it ran like dogshit on the Atom-powered netbooks we were using at the time. What a great product that they just... tossed. It was IRC with benefits.
- pseufaux 3y agoRather than participating in this nonsense, I'll just remain a Reader.
- villgax 3y agoI'm glad that reddit not being profitable up until right now is being highlighted very well. So much for raising money from autocracies & then whining about dissent
- nashashmi 3y agoWhat are the chances of Reddit charging subreddits a $$ for going private? What are the chances of Reddit adding red tape for removing subreddits?
- deliriumchn 3y agoIt cannot charge subs anything since they don't pay them anything. They can try to forcefully make them go public or change mods (I kinda see how it can go bad and turn into r/anarchychess) but thats kinda it.
- maegul 3y agoSo, genuine question, how much of Reddit is archived? If there’s a lot on the internet archive, say, could that now be bundled up similar to how the Usenet stuff is on Google groups?
- quadsteel 3y ago"These archives are purely text and include no media. They are json items scraped from the Reddit API and include all information for every post and comment 2005-06 to 2023-03." https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/historic_reddit_archives_ongoing_archival_effort/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/histor...
- fsflover 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254172
- gumballindie 3y agoIt’s not google thats getting worse, it’s the overall internet. I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects or sealing them off. Similarly, companies will limit access to ensure monetisation. No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange. The dead internet is even more likely to happen.
- seebye 3y ago> I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects This will just lead to forks (if your project was popular).
- gumballindie 3y agoWell i am not talking about impulsive “make repo private” type of action but rather the team that maintains large open source projects to take coordinated action in moving, removing or updating the license of their projects. Forking code is not an issue - i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance.
- bshipp 3y ago> i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance Well....yeah? open source doesn't mean you don't have to do anything to make it work. Many times I've forked a project, cleaned up maintenance issues so it ran on my instance, and then did a pull request so the original author could incorporate the update. While we are blessed with many turn-key projects that require little more installation effort than following detailed instructions, FOSS is supposed to be a community effort, not something falling on the shoulders of a tiny maintenance team.
- Cpoll 3y ago> No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange. I feel (or perhaps hope) the spirit of FOSS precludes the notion of "stealing." Besides, open source is no stranger to being monetized for the bare minimum mention required by whatever license.
- asnyder 3y agoWaPo's take on this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/14/reddit-blackout-google-search-results/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/14/reddit-...
- Proven 3y ago[dead]
- xkbarkar 3y agoI dont think I have ever got a quality search result by appending reddit. Cant for the life of me figure out how HN users find useful results there. chatgpt has improved search for me by orders of magnitude. Especially since google has started to border on useless. Bur searching reddit? Meh. Not for technical stuff at least. Niche high quality subs may point me in the right direction. Like r/ponds for example. Wonderful little sub. r/doggroomers is absolute shit mostly full of shaming dog owner pics and toxic comments. r/programming was great 8 years ago. Now I doubt any human over 18 posts there. Honestly if reddit never comes back again I think the interwebs have gained a level in quality as it is just a toxic echo chamber for young people who think they are some form of superiour liberals. Good riddance.
- Fyrezerk 3y agoI challenge you to provide me a better resource than reddit for finding reliable product reviews and discussions for just about anything you can buy.
- dredmorbius 3y agoConsumer Reports: <https://www.consumerreports.org/ https://www.consumerreports.org/>
- Bitsc 3y agoDepends on the product. For Game Reviews, Steam reviews are better. The problem with reddit is that just because someone recommends a product, doesn't mean they actually bought/experienced it. That being said it is a great way to find a product's defects, as people usually post to reddit.
- reportgunner 3y ago4chan general threads. /g/ for tech, /diy/ or /out/ for tools and gear, /ck/ for cooking and more. If you need to actively find a review for some item you want to buy it's probably not that great of an item imho.
- 3y ago