I don’t think it’s rose colored glasses. Google saw the value of forums as a source of information when it bought and indexed Deja News’ usenet archive. A lot o

I don’t think it’s rose colored glasses. Google saw the value of forums as a source of information when it bought and indexed Deja News’ usenet archive. A lot of pop and early Internet culture resided there. This was then turned into Google Groups, underfunded, targeted and businesses, and more or less buried. Independent forums (phpBB, and the like) often came up on searches before this communities moved to Facebook Groups, where they’re mostly set to private due to spammers. Similarly there was a time when Google indexed tweets more or less live, so you could find information for very recent events. I think Twitter asked for money and so that was the end of this. Now I think Reddit, and maybe Stack Overflow, are the only things helping Google be anything more than an extremely hostile version of the yellow pages. I fear Reddit might at some point withdraw their content from Google and that’ll be the end of it.