6 ms·
This 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 a
by acters 3y ago
This 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)