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.
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.
Startpage is pretty good.
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 depends what you were searching for. For help with Stable Diffusion or programming questions or other technical subjects, the reddit communities were actually one of the best places I could go to for answers
They still are on archive.org. you’ll get the info you need and reddit gets nothing. Win win
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.
undefined> 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.
Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos
there’s a browser plug in for that.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.
I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.
Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?
You’d have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you’d be able to tease out any bias that exists.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
Big suprise! I’m this close to Uninstaller reddit.
Google search is a pain from a year ago.
When searching for something on Google, you should include terms like “Reddit”, “superuser”, “Stack Overflow”, etc., to get better results. Because if you don’t include them, the first page of Google looks like a bot-generated page. Of course, Google are ‘not quite happy’.
I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there’s so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that’s why they don’t see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on… So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far… and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they’ve been worse than competitors for years.
Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.
That was one of the first things that I thought about. People can’t affix “Reddit” to their Google searches in good faith anymore, so what is the next most reliable community?
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.
Reddit.com appears on KilledByGoogle.com next year.
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
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.
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
