Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
It’s going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.
Google’s got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now…can’t find shit. And it’s about half its own fault.
I’ll put right around half of the blame on “platformization.” Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn’t get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what’s there. Twitter is slightly more open…but not really.
The other half of the problem is Google’s own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.
That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they’ve gotten in the habit of appending “reddit” to google search strings because a. that’s where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit’s own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn’t work so well.
So what are we keeping them around for?
And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven’t used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I’m going to a specialized information website, for buying things I’m looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I’ve grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I’m having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.
That’s why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.
Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don’t feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.
Not sure i like metered searches… and $25/month seems steep for unlimited.
But i will try this out, i would gladly pay for actually good search. Maybe keep google for simple web navigation then the $5 tier kagi for more nuanced search, should keep under the 300 search limit with that approach
I use Kagi and never pay more than $10/mo even though I use it a lot. I think most people don’t know how much they search in a month, so the pricing can be confusing.
I have the early adopter pro plan, which gives me extra searches (1500 instead of 1000), but for reference, I averaged 1044 searches/mo over the past 6 months (not counting this month). So if I had the standard pro plan, I’d have paid $10.66 per month on average.
The unlimited plan seems excessive to me, unless you’re playing with the API or something like that.
As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I’ll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.
Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn’t restore your comments? They’ve been doing that to a bunch of people.
So far they have not.
You still can request a data export to see what they still have.
As a plus point if your GPDR request was logged and they can’t fulfill it in 90 days they will be fined.
They won’t be fined if you don’t report it
While we are fixing things Google, can we also not have the first 20 results be YouTube videos that are 30 minutes long, when the answer I want is typically a sentence or two…?
im adding “-youtube” to searches for a long time. The amount of Clickbaitvideos, no matter what you are searching for, is just crazy.
Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.
Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on “the best impact hammer” or “how to buy solar panels” without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.
They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google’s retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn’t satisfy it’s ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.
I literally couldn’t find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.
Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.
Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match… They don’t fucking work anymore.
We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)
I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).
Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn’t significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.
i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling “how to x site:reddit.com”, we’ll just fedisearch “how to x”
in fact, i’m pretty sure i already found one but it wasn’t very good, and i’ve forgotten it’s name
It’s amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.
In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we’ve built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn’t, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add “site:reddit.com” to the query. But if the niche communities die, that’s a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.
Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.
So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit’s own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won’t realise this.
I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.
My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.
Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.
Keep checking, see what happens
Although I suspect edits are less likely to be restored than edits+deletions, or even edits alone.
Certainly, I’ve had a couple comments that I manually edited that have stayed, while a few others have popped back up.
But so far, comments that I have edited and deleted from the source URL have stayed down. It’s only the edits from the profile (using PowerDeleteSuite) where some have come back. Granted, most were old, now I’m getting info the recent ones they’ve been lingering on.
I still have a good 28,000 out of 76,000 lines to get through though from my original CSV file. I will make sure they’re all processed before 1 July, and if reddit restores any of them I’ll have logs to show their violation.
I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I’m new) smacks of the “old Internet.” I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.
Of course they are. Adding “Reddit” at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).
That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.
It’s pretty incredible how often I put “Reddit” in a Google search. It really is the quickest way to get a good answer to most questions, from how to fix an Excel error to which robot vacuum is most reliable.
I still remember the vacuum dude. There was a legendary post probably a decade ago made by the world’s most knowledgeable vacuum salesman. He laid out all the secrets of the industry, and went into detail I didn’t know I needed regarding how they all work.
To this day I remember his advice: get a bagged vacuum if you want a clean carpet.
Not a vacuum salesman but repair man. Still active on reddit, but that’s the last AMA he did.
I doubt vacuums have changed that much in 4 years.
I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you’d eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I’m grateful.
I remember being good at google-fu, and then thinking my google-fu was failing me.
No, it was the Google that failed me.
I’ve noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.
I didn’t realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It’s just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.
I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.
What’s even more annoying than google populating half the first page with ads is that the links don’t even work half the time these days.
If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it’s safe to assume chat GPT’s training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.
That would explain why it’s all written like wiki content edited by a redditor.
Fuuuuuuck… Imagine if chat GPT started amending its results with… “EDIT: wElL tHiS bLeW uP oVeRnIgHt… tHaNkS fOr ThE gOlD kInD ReDdiToR”
That’d be so damn annoying haha
Like that story of a child saying “remember to like and subscribe” at bedtime because she thought that was the words for goodbye
Wait is that some kid IRL? Or we talking about gpt speaking as a child?
This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.
Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol
Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error
It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google
I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.
What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.
It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers
Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.
Months? You mean weeks.
Are you saying they were going to… regReddit?
First they will rename it few times, Reddit+, RedditOut, RedditWave then merge it will Google Groups wait for a year and then pull the plug.
It would be cheaper for google to just buy reddit, remove the adds and open the api’s again.
Having relevent search results is priceless.
Knowing google they would buy it, release a big roadmap of plans for the website and then shut it down the next day.
remove the adds
lol, this is google we’re talking about
Reddit.com appears on KilledByGoogle.com next year.
I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.
If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…
I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.
