Google execs admit users are ‘not quite happy’ with search experience after Reddit blackouts
Google execs admit users are ‘not quite happy’ with search experience after Reddit blackouts
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
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.
Yeah this, it's demented.
I will google something specific that I know is on the internet and it comes back with ten ridiculously off-topic AI spam blogs and "no further results."
It's more important than ever then to make sure that this place stays a place for people, and not bullshit.
Well, what caused the chase for ad-money and affiliate link clicks? Google, Amazon & other mega corps. It's just indirect enshittification :-|
Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.
The last couple of times I've had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.
If it keeps up this way, we're going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.
Google sucks now at giving me information. It seems like now it just gives me products.
We will have AI write the junk and click bait articles and AI sift through the junk. What a future
That's not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don't like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it's an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.
I haven't been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it's just stupid crap that isn't helpful. 'Here's 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.'
I'm in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google's attempt to be useful was to to search for "baluster" instead of "banister". It's a complete fucking joke.
And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you've ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I'm located in the US.
The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.
I've found that bad addons, spyware, and adware can immensely affect your Google results. Which is... Really alarming, but.... Its true.
This is not to say a lot of seo hasn't absolutely ruined search. Because it has.
If you know exactly what you want and the perfect key words you can usually get it to show up on the first page as long as you’re willing to scroll. Compared to its peak of “have a vague idea and we’ll find it” it’s really sad
Even Wikipedia results are 20 or more results down. I use Google search less every day.
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.
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.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.
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
What were you searching?
An error log for some Scala code, tried the usual thing of Googling full error log, key words etc and nothing really returned any actual useful results (or none at all)
Put the full log into Bing and the first few results were straight from stack overflow and a raised GitHub issue describing the errors cause
I'm a beta tester for Google's Bard AI system. Google search results for tech troubleshooting are fairly garbage, but if you ask the same question to Bard it will give you a precise and concise answer, with examples. I also use ChatGPT and it's easy to see that Google's focus on its AI seems to be search results.
PS: It's also been sprinkled into Google Workspace. Emails, docs and spreadsheets now have very good predictive auto complete.
Is this an unreleased Bard? I tried the publicly available version a few weeks ago and it was not particularly good at anything I tried, especially in comparison to chatGPT4.
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).
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?
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.
DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.
https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.
https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.
But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.
I'm using startpage.com for a few months now, I'm surprisingly quite happy with the quality of search results.
Ecosia has been pretty okay for me. Additionally, they are a non-profit that plants trees based off user usage.
Kagi is a premium search engine that aims to have the highest quality search results. They use algorithms to surface up more indie content, like blogs, and downrank tracker-heavy pages and blog/SEO spam. The difference between Kagi and Google is night and day.
Startpage is pretty good.
Searx ;)
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.
So what are we keeping them around for?
There are no better alternatives.
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.
That tracks so much. The two big I social media paltforms I was involved in were Facebook and Reddit. My distrust in Facebook/Meta is so large, I'm willing to block any fediverse instance that federates with them. And Reddit's only chance to get me back would be to become a trust-managed nonprofit within at most a year (but only if that's how long it would take to implement if they started to go that way within the next few weeks).
Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.
I've got the Nitter equivalent that works just as well. Well, until Muskrat breaks it again, lol.
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.
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.
I'm very new to it, but it feels like a very complicated and polished webring.
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.
Google heavily prioritizes .com, .org and other similar "popular" top level domains.
.world, . travel and similar ones are heavily penalized in Google's ranking for search results.
I can see it on the localized version of Google where I'm at.
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.
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 do wonder sometimes if that advice still holds, or if vacuum tech made it obsolete...
i wonder if chatgpt will eventually replace reddit.
in the same way that infinite monkeys will replace Shakespeare, maybe.
(this is not meant to imply that reddit posts/comments are praiseworthy works of literature. although obviously, they are.)
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.
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.
Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.
I actually think Google has a long term plan to buyout Reddit. Google Groups failed miserably several years ago, so Google would LOVE to own a mature social media platform.
The former, despised owner gets to cash out. And Forbes and WSJ will write glowing articles about how Google "saved" Reddit. (Narrator: what's left of Reddit will get unbelievably sh*tty. And then it will die, like Google Groups).
Google Perspectives will highlight results from Quora? That's the last thing I want.
Dear God, i hope that's not true. Quora answer quality is probably worse than Yahoo answers; at least those were just shit posts, 90% of Quora answers are ads by the creator of some project in my experience
For real. Looks like speedrunning digging one owns grave is becoming hella popular in silicon valley as of late. Everyone wants to set a new record.
And TikTok. They've listed that one, too.
TikTok? Really Google?!
Whats bothering me the most about it is that Reddit is still a valuable source of information for so many things, can't get around a boss fight in a certain older videogame? Yep, there are about 10 threads about it on reddit from years ago.
The amount information on there is big enough that often times many of the top useful search results are in reddit, I hope Lemmy can fill the gap, at least partially but I'm aware that it could years and that's only if the fediverse picks up well enough.
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It's so accurate it hurts me
That's way too straight forward for Kojima. You need at least 3 more hours of cutscenes.
Back in the early Sega Genesis days, Sega used to send out hints for games if you wrote and asked them. My favorite was for the game Last Battle (a Fist of the North Star game in the JP market), the tips for several levels simply said "Punch and kick your enemy on your way towards victory".
This is fair. GameFAQs is still this if I look something up for a pre-2010 game a lot of the time.
A few weeks ago, when things started to get heated, I had the reflex of copying all the helpful posts I made amd putting them on my own knowledge base in case something goes wrong with reddit. I can always put them somewhere since I've secured that info on my own server.
Maybe you should put them here somewhere
DuckDuckGo has great results IMO
DDG is my default search engine but there are some types of searches that it's not good at yet, so I find myself often toggling between the two after I see that DDGs response isn't going to cut it.
Earlier today I was searching for a really specific Python error message and google had zero results. I tried Yandex and got the correct result on the first response.
Each search engine seems to be optimizing for a certain type of query and answer.
I liked them well enough, but recently is it just me or it seems like every time I reload a search by simply going back to the page, the ranking of the results immediately changes?
That is supper annoying to me, as now I can't keep track of the results I opened easilyDDG mostly gets its results from bing
we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
True, but they also have their own crawler. Bing is also very bad for privacy.
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’.
Yep now Google is 99% useless. Bunch of AI written nonsense
How long until these huge websites pop?
Not soon enough.
Never. They own the internet and all of the internet users and revenue now.
It’s useless for tech. But a much larger pool of users are using google to still search scores of games, YouTube and cat gifs.
It's really frustrating how much blatantly AI-written shit is at the top of every Google search nowadays.
Like, you Google "how to install a door" and you find an article that's like
"Here's how you install a door. Installing a door is really easy when you know how This guide will tell you how to install a door on ten easy steps. The first step in installing your door is to pick a door at the store." It repeats the title of the article everyother damn sentence, and takes FOREVER to get to a useful point. And sometimes they give flat out incorrect advice.
Then, you check the urland it's something like "techbuiz.com" and you've never even heard of this shit before, why the hellisit the top indexed result?
This isn't a problem to do with the reddit blackout at all, it's the enshittification of Google algorithm. They sell those top slots to the highest bidder, it's no longer about who actually has relevant information about the thing you searched for, it's about who had just enough matching keywords AND gave Google money to put up top.
Of course Google blames other sites, like reddit. It makes up all kinds of bullshit to obfuscate what they are doing, and sin e they have a proprietary algorithm nobody can prove that they are doing what I described above. But it's so blatantly obvious that they are that it's nearly insulting that they keep pretending they aren't.
Google used to punish sites that used more than 3.5% keyword density, but it seems that they stopped doing that at some point. It's interesting that with every update to their algorithm their results have become less reliable, yet more profitable for them. By interesting I mean frustrating.
SEO scammers are already figuring out how to game Google's new Perspectives thing: https://searchengineland.com/optimize-content-google-perspectives-427876
I know this because when I Googled for, "Google Perspectives" Google gave me that URL with all the tips & tricks on how to game it 🙄
The natural degredation of google just comes down to the incredibly stupid levels of search engine optimization and ads. Most articles in particular are so terrible, I'm convinced a lot of them are just written by bots. What I want are answers actually written by humans on discussion boards with a rating system. That's what made me add "reddit" to the end of everything. Genuine humans, NOT people being paid to write articles or ads.
Not necessarily by bots, but a lot of product-related articles - say, "What's the best washing machine?" or "What's the best hot wire cutter?" or anything like that - will have multiple near-identical articles across multiple websites with links for each product generating a kickback for the author. Whereas Reddit was just people talking.
Articles like that are probably starting to be written by AI for sure though. You could write an article on every type of product that way, and get kickbacks from all of them, all while depriving people of actual useful info. Woo, innovation!
How many meeting did it take? Meddeling managers with sparkly eyes and a powerpoint sending the business into a doom loop and giving themselves a POB and a payraise.
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
Google has a better search algorithm buried somewhere deep in their behemoth of a codebase, but you have to specify the site to get around all of the damn ads and shitty articles.
it's weird that all these articles talk about this only being a problem for people who put "reddit" in the URL; I never do that, and 90% of the time when I search Google for something (especially something about a video game), the first 5 or so results are all from reddit anyway.
Are you logged in when searching? Probably reddit just has the best answers for your questions.
But for newly released games reddit is most often the best source in my experience.
Google search has been pretty weak for awhile now. I/O spoke a lot of big talk about bring generative AI into search, but from my part of the world it still seems the same.
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.
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.
Either that or announce a replacement app with 50% of the features removed and then kill off the original just because
This would low-key be a great way to have your very own sweet sweet human contributed ML-data pipeline, and a pretty high quality community moderated one at that. Give access to 3rd party devs and lock all competing ML techs out. [r word] is valued at $10 billion (fucking lol) but I bet that gutless scumbag sp*z would fold for less than 10% of that if he has more than two braincells to rub together.
Big part of me hopes Google's myopic corporatised ass never sees the opportunity and we rebuild the mf free internet from here on out.
LOL, Google already did that once, literally two decades ago. Remember Google Groups?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2800078/google-acquires-usenet-archive-from-deja-com.html
Maybe, but like I and I'm sure many others think, not going back regardless. Kbin is it.
remember, when the execs of an evilcorp announce that their users are unhappy with something, it usually means that the execs are unhappy with something (and it's usually their profit margin)
Imagine an encyclopedia.
Now imagine I own the encyclopedia, and Walmart offers me money.
So i paste Walmart's Xmas catalogue pages in between the useful information in the encyclopedia. You ask about frog facts, you get frog pajamas. You try to look up cultural information and get travel ticket prices. You never planned on purchasing anything, and you are too poor too anyway. But somehow I and Walmart make money off of your displeasure.
This is ad revenue. This is the modern economy. Its a sham. Its an infinite money go brrrttt machine for billionaires.
Enshitification.
I hope the articles and us talking about it so much can get some scientist to do a study about this!
What immediately comes to mind: how long does enshittification take to progress through the stages typically? Is there any company owned platforms who managed to avoid enshittification? What percentage? Is practicing enshittification more profitable and thus pushing out companies who don‘t do it? If yes, how much more profitable?
I need some cold and hard facts cause there is still an amount of denial around even these parts, which perhaps scientific research could help with.
Wow, one meaningless, entirely replaceable piece of shit brought two giant companies to their knees. Good job, capitalism. Such a fragile snowflake.
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’ve noticed the degradation of google search since they introduced search suggestion completions. That is forever the timemark (landmark for time?) in my mind of the enshittification of google search.
Verbatim search is the only way to use it anymore. I changed that to the default when doing address bar searches.
I've stopped using it. I now bounce around alternatives but Kagi is the best and my go to now. Here are some alternatives to consider:
- DuckDuckGo
- Brave Search
- Ecosia (A bit spammy, but a passive praxis.)
- https://www.perplexity.ai/
- https://www.phind.com/
- https://kagi.com/
- https://search.marginalia.nu/ (very cool!)
- https://www.wolframalpha.com/
- https://knaben.eu/ (torrents)
Thank you for bringing up Kagi, I had never heard of it before. An intriguing idea for sure and I am not averse to paying for searches, but as a serial Google-fu practitioner $10/month for 1000 searches (1.5c per search after) seems quite steep to me. Some days I swear that would last me 24 hours at most. I need to start tracking that I think.
I do however applaud the seeming transparency on their website. It may or may not be for me, but if they really plan to operate how they lay out on their website, it truly is a breath of fresh air and I wish them luck.
I thought I make a ton of searches too (and yeah apparently I do vs normal internet user) but when I tracked my usage it turned out to be around 30-40 searches / day. So, it's not that bad. ATM I still have Ecosia as the default search engine and when it fails to turn up good results I rerun the search with Kagi (which is indeed quite a bit better). So far I seem to use Kagi like 1-3 times a day so it's not that bad.
which one you think would be the best for tech support ? :,(
I've been using Kagi for ~6-9 months, as a developer. Gives satisfying results and I never feel the need to go back to Google. When I was using DDG, I always went back too Google to get better results.
Super interesting the trick we all thought was a secret, stopped working, and now executives from one of the worlds biggest companies are having trouble as a result lol
This trick used to be common before embedded searches were actually decent. Wikipedia in particular took a long time before their search was even close to "site:wikipedia.org [search term]". I think the saddest part is that people seemed to forget about it for so long until realizing they could use it for Reddit too. So far the trick seems to work for lemmy if you point it at an arbitrary instance like lemmy.world, the content just isn't quite there yet.
I think people forgot how things were before apps and the centralization of social media in so few domains.
People forgot web browsers are the app of all apps.
Search will probably come down to you having a personal AI agent that will broker with other AI agents for relevant data. It will likely become a hell scape.
Say the execs of the company who has ruined the internet with seo crap.
I'm genuinely curious, what's the alternative? Google tries to rank the "best" results, so naturally people try to game that system. How do you design a search engine in such a way that you get the better results without manipulation?
DDG tries to help with bangs etc
I think the solution here would have something to do with micro-transactions. For whatever reason, whether it being technical or social or else, it has never worked. But in an alternative internet where you can pay content creatores gradually as you traverse the net, gatekeeprs such as google would be less important, since they are not the only ones who can pay.
Projects such as search.marginalia.nu/ are also an excellent place to look, which yield limited but quality results.
I've started using DDG as defacto since the last 3 months. Use Google search only for sports updates because they've good widgets for those.
I gave an effort to DDG for months and I really wanted to like that but it hasn't been that good for me. Image search especially is really subpar, but also in general searches a lot of times I had to resort to using !g after messing around trying to actually find what I wanted.
I don't like Google but I have to admit that their principle product is above the competition right now. I hope it'll change but honestly, with adblock if Google search is the only service I'm using from them and it's working out I'm kinda okay with that.
If they start plastering their results with even more ads tho, I'll definetly jump ship in a heartbeat.
You might want to give Searx a shot. It's a FOSS, self-hosted (with several public instances) search engine that can pull results from several other search providers while stripping ads/tracking/personal data.
Try Brave search... It's so underrated. They have made big improvements in the last few months. As a long time Googler I use brave about 98% of the time now and have it set as my default. I never did like DDG but brave actually gives quality relevant results.
People will just have to start adding lemmy instead :)
Better yet, add "fediverse".
Sadly, Google Search doesn't seem to index Lemmy instances the way it does Reddit.
Sure, you can add "site: lemmy.world" to your search strings, but that mostly returns links to community or user feeds that mention your search terms, not links to the actual posts. And it doesn't group the results together for convenience, the way it does for Reddit.
Hopefully, this will change as Lemmy becomes more popular. We could also outright ask Google to start treating Lemmy this way.
Let's just say that my use of the Wayback Machine is up by 1000% since the blackout started
I read half this article and just thought, “yeah no shit.” I swear Google conditioned everyone to just settle for dumb answers.
It’s amazing how few people understand how SEM works or the fact that Google makes services for freely available in order to build a profile on you and sell targeted ad space. The algorithm is tuned to for clicks. The amount of sponsored results and crappy listicles you need to scroll through is unreal. “Reddit” was the shortcut to opinions outside of sponsored influencers with affiliate links… but I’m sure TikTok and YouTube will fill that void just fine.
I would love it if they built an extensive profile on me and used that to serve results but they don't. Any time there is any commercial interest in what I am searching for it forgets everything and just spews out whatever bullshit the highest bidder wants me to see.
Current way to search on google for me is: Add reddit to search string, and set data to before may 1st 2023 Copy link suggested by google and change reddit to reveddit or any of the alternatives there
Results will go out of date but maybe this will tide me over until a good lemmy search is up and running.
Most of the time you can just click the 3 dots at the side of the search result and then click the "Cached" button on the bottom of the popup.
I'm not shocked whatsoever. Especially as of a few months ago, I only get SEO spam around 80% of the time, unless I stick [r word] in front of my query. It's not even just Google or just [r word] going to shit, I can see the internet of just 10 years ago dying in front of my eyes.
We've been not happy with google search for years(Because it is garbage now) and it has very little to do with Reddit.
My biggest concern with the downfall or even small proportional depopulation of Reddit is 100% going to be /r/sysadmin and /r/msp not being the best place to determine if there is an actual outage in progress for various cloud based IT services. I mean, it's a real, legit concern to worry over if you're in IT.
Lemmy has one comm for Dev/Ops I think but not the convenience of having a place for network guys, sysadmins, and programmers all in different spots.
Users weren't happy with the search results before the blackout either, and "quite" has no part in it. Google traded quality results for revenue over a decade ago... right about the time they changed their Don't Be Evil motto.
Hahahahhahahahah
That's pathetically laughable for google
I wonder about the odds that Google would buy reddit. Not saying it's a good thing, but it could be a strategic play for them.
If they did they'd probably just scuttle it after a few years. It's what they do.
In that case, I hope they buy it.
My thinking is that they'd buy it to harvest the data for AI training.
The user experience is pretty much secondary to the strategic play here.
Reddit's value is in the body of data its amassed, not in the ongoing service to users it provides. Limiting 3rd party access is all about protecting that and has the added benefit (to them, not the users) of creating a walled garden where they can increase the (meagre) margins from advertisors by controlling the data flow to users.
Not saying I am a fan of all this, I'm just recognizing the situation.
I really don't know though...
Reddit wave +
If Google makes changes that stop people from clicking through to reddit due to the protests then the protests will have likely done more lasting damage than anyone imagined.
I'm "not quite happy" with the current state of Google, either. What are you going to do about that? You used to be a good search engine... what the hell happened?
Google has not been shy about grabbing content from other sites and showing it directly on their search page.
I imagine part of their frustration is that the technical issue of caching and showing relevant reddit/stackexchange/y!answers in their search results is a solved problem, but they're being held back by pesky legal and business constraints, and therefore are forced to remain vulnerable to external events.
The obsession with giving people results directly in the search page was a huge mistake on their part. Content quality is just decreasing, people get wrong answers to questions they would have otherwise answered easily and accurately by reading an article on a website rather than a sentence taken out of context.
And for businesses to make it to the stupid Google box, they have to write articles formatted not for human eyes or cognition, but for SEO.
Thus Google is one of the main drives of quality decreasing online. Their unhealthy practices forces everyone to write dumb shit (like those Q&A or click bait articles) in order to have some kind of platform or presence.
It feels absolutely nutty that it's gone from
- Reddit search sucks, I literally use google to search stuff in Reddit
- Things I've never seen: Page 2 of Google
to
- I literally need to add reddit when I do a google search
- I cannot find what I want after page 5
Google used to be synonymous with reliable results and Reddit as the awkward website you barely spoke about. Now you need to use reddit to find proper results because the slow bleeding that is SEO has screwed over Google.
This is a good change as it may expand to more sites. I'm one of those users that used reddit in query often looking for opinions or reviews. We should get Lemmy on the list.
I've been using qwant for a couple years now without any issue. It mainly uses Bing as a backend.
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?
Google today reminds me of what AltaVista became before Google. ChatGPT is amazing but now it and other LLMs are being used to generate crap content. I fear that the incestuous nature of AI training on AI may lead to “inbreeding” and all the problems that brings with it.
Boo fucking hoo
"people come very close to realizing what public services are" - texas, probably
No shit lol
Why do they call stuff "Googling" as it was a real word, if Google is failing at being a search engine?
To make googling a generic brand
Monopoly, there are many more search engines like that one but people only use it because it is the default one
Big suprise! I'm this close to Uninstaller reddit.
I discovered the kagi search engine last week and it's so much better. No ads. I can move favored sites up or pin them in the search results.
Edit: Found out they only allow 100 searches for free, after that it's a paid monthly subscription. So ignore my previous advice...
Who still uses Google in 2023
What do you use? Bing? Yahoo?
duckduckgo.com for images
search.brave.com for everything else
Duckduckgo mainly.
Startpage still seem to give me good search results despite using Google index itself. I guess a lack filter bubble have its own benefits.