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Google search results are literally the only time I read Reddit content these days, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. They’re going to lose so many views if they block their content on Google.
True, but Google search is such garbage now that it would suffer quite a bit from not being able to present Reddit threads to answer questions. So not sure who’d be worse off here
It’s a Lose-Lose situation. Reddit has a fetish for that…
Google can index other forums, like our own. Or stuff like Wikipedia. If Reddit doesn’t want to be indexed by external search engines, then they gotta build their own or be unsearchable. Their existing search system is abysmal.
Reddit becoming unsearchable would really damage their usability as a forum site.
You can say that even if Reddit’s value as a forum falls off, they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, they can still sell access to their existing forum archives for AI training, but those have been archived and are downloadable online, at least up until early in this year. I mean, there are gonna be companies running AIs trained on that in jurisdictions that Reddit cannot sue them in and don’t care about honoring US IP rights, like Russia.
Reddit has been trying to build a usable search since 2008. It’s not happening.
Great time to plug kagi.com
What’s the deal with this whole kagi circlejerk aroumnd here
you should try using it. Seriously. I thought the same as you, “why are all these people plugging kagi so hard”. Well, I literally started using it 3 months ago and I’ve only used Google search 3 times since then and not a single one of those times did Google succeed at the search I needed either. Google was so fucking bad that I essentially was forced to make a change, and I’d tried DDG like 2 years ago and hated it, I tried Bing and hated it.
I fucking love not being tracked, not worrying about being the product. I can search what I want without fear of being watched. It’s fantastic. And it’s fucking better than Google. God, google has gotten so bad I literally had trouble doing my job some days. No more of that bullshit.
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
SearXNG
that’s awesome. Is the quality good? I’m really loving Kagi, but I love OSS stuff so might consider this. Maintenance is also an issue. I’m tired of maintaining things. I’ve got my own unraid server, pihole, etc and I’m not in the mood for adding more stuff.
Pro tip: you can use Google’s Verbatim mode to get exactly what you want.
What’s wrong with Google? I can honestly say I’ve never had issues. If you haven’t given it location privileges, that’s the only time I’ve seen it give crappy results
It’s gotten really worse over the last year or so. They try to be overly “intelligent” by suggesting search phrases you didn’t even input, watering down the results.
I’m a web developer and when I google for “string”, I don’t want to get results for “yarn” to put in a fake extreme example. Rewording my search phrases is one of the worst features they ever introduced. I know what I’m looking for and I don’t need assistance with that.
Google even started ignoring operators sometimes. Back in the good old days you were able to put a word into quotations to tell the engine it must be included in the results. Now when I do this it only mostly works but when they run out of results they just go back to the default behaviour of including everything that might loosely fit the search phrase.
It feels like Google is afraid to show you no results, as if that was a crime or something.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Bing works so much better for me when I look up specific error messages etc.
For my development work, it works fine… haven’t had any issue (but i mainly do a lot of LUA / React). With bing though, a lot of links I got last I tested (a year or so ago) were literally dodgy websites
Bing (and therefore DuckDuckGo, which is what I generally use and is a wrapper around Bing) is definitely worse than Google especially for dev research, but it’s not as good as it used to be.
I do use Google for a lot of my dev research, and they seem to be losing the ongoing war against spamers flooding the internet with garbage content.
Websites like reddit (and beehaw) are somewhat of an oasis – actively moderated with absolute garbage content deleted straight away and questionable content at least has replies where people have pointing out if they think it’s wrong. If (when?) Reddit goes away, that’s a whole bunch of really good content that will suddenly disappear from google results, which will be sad.
PS: If you haven’t already, try buying a subscription to ChatGPT+ and use GPT4 as the first place you go for all your LUA/React questions. I find it gives far better answers than Google for most things. You can sort of dip your toes in the AI waters by trying Bing Chat… but it’s nowhere near as good for code as ChatGPT+.
I actually use Copilot mainly these days tbh for a lot of things
there was definitely a time where i got some results from google in a very ad-like manner, super fucking annoying: “you may like this…” and spamming different search terms, locations etc.
i haven’t seen it since, i figured they were A/B testing the design
The one thing Reddit is great for, and for which substitutes do not yet exist, is its crowdsourced information. Especially product reviews. And finding those from within Reddit is impossible because their search simply does not work.
Appending “Reddit” to a Google search remains the best first-past method for making certain kinds of decisions where you need concrete, good-quality answers. Even for that, it’s a bit of a minefield. Especially post-mod-purge, a lot of the once-great enthusiast subs have gotten pretty blase. Still better than all those consumer advertorial “BEST OF 2024” lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.
On top of that, the “new” sight is a million times less usable than old.reddit.com and search engines shoot you in through that terrifically terrible gateway to experience confusingly-organized and incomplete content. Orders of magnitude worse on mobile, too.
If Reddit is de-indexed, I’ll simply never be there at this point. Though I admit, I’m already there extremely rarely.
Still better than all those consumer advertorial “BEST OF 2024” lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.
The SEO spam that I find that Google is absolutely unable to filter out is all the AI-generated sites. They generally have a page with a long list of questions and poorly-generated answers.
It don’t know if it’s one company doing it at mass scale or if there are hordes of copycats, but it swamps Google search results these days.
New here? Japanese website have been mostly like that for decades now.
I haven’t used Japanese websites enough to be able to provide a comparison.
It definitely wasn’t the situation for English-based websites five years back. It was an issue at the beginning of this year. I don’t know where it really started.
I started noticing it about a year and a half ago…
Pretty sure most of those are not AI generated (yet…).
They pay humans $2 an hour to write a paragraph ten different ways, then mix those with other paragraphs written by other people to create huge “content farms” of sites full of ads.
And they are deliberately shit - because they depend on visitors giving up and deciding to click an ad instead of whatever they came to the site for.
Though I admit, I’m already there extremely rarely.
I always experience an onosecond after accidentally clicking on a Reddit thread in the search results. Followed by a short wave of disgust by the often mean/negative comments and pressing Mouse 4/Back.
Wait, I just realized I can block reddit.com completely in kagi. 10$/month nicely spent; begone thot!
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
Looks nice, but for me features like fastgpt are worth the 10$/month
There was slant for a bit. Turned out to not be as reactive to market distributions.
Stack exchange has some good stuff going for it.
The browser add-ons for redirecting to old.reddit are doing good work. Best add-ons 2023
Yeah, I’ve used one, but there is also sloowly accumulating bitrot there. It’s not getting any work done on it, and Reddit was pretty clear that they weren’t going to do more work on it.
Submissions of image collections have some bad link; they didn’t exist back when old.reddit.com was the norm.
www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com handle underscores in URLs pasted straight into Markdown and auto-linkified differently (one requires that they be backslash-escaped, the other that they not be backslash-escaped).
There’s some kind of inline image stuff in the new UI, IIRC, that doesn’t show up on old.reddit.com. I was surprised when I bipped over to the new UI and saw it.
You can hack a dark mode in in various ways, but it’s normally a light theme.
Not really specific to just the old Web UI, but third-party client issue is a factor for phone users. Reddit’s web UI on mobile isn’t fantastic. old.reddit.com is okay for desktop use, but it’s not really a great solution for phones.
Great overview of the issue
I’m guessing with the API dead it’s the only way to find content on Reddit anymore, too. I can’t imagine the Reddit searches that worked weren’t using the API, and Reddit’s search is a dumpster fire.
Same but the nihilist in me wants them to do it anyways. Better to rip the bandaid off in one go than to deal with jumping through hoops for several years until they ultimately remove it from Google search anyway. With a clean break, we can start rebuilding that trove of knowledge somewhere else and hopefully not all in one place again.
Yeah. I only ever read reddit posts when they’re about a technical issue I’m facing.
Besides, Reddit’s search is crap. When I was on Reddit, I used to use Google to search posts.
Seriously. Searching google with
site:reddit.comis a thing for a reason. Their on site search is atrocious.
You aren’t alone. I stopped posting to Reddit in the protest and haven’t posted/voted since, but old threads are just too useful to completely block it out.
The thing is, though, my Reddit usage from Google Search hasn’t replaced what used to be my time browsing Reddit. I now exclusively use it for informational old threads via Google Search.
If before API terms changes I spent 7 hours a week on Reddit, and let’s say 5% of that was needing Google search results from Reddit specifically and the other 95% of usage was scrolling through my Reddit front page; I am not now spending 7 hours on Reddit via Google search. I’m now only using that 5% of 7 hours/week = 21 minutes/week on Reddit, and maybe even less considering my newfound aversion to the website.
And I suspect that most of the people who stopped using Reddit after the changes—whether by lapse or by principle—are not gonna come crawling back to it if Reddit chooses to sever that tenuous metaphoric link.
Edit: clarified a subject
Literally the single prominent technical problem that has spanned Reddit’s entire life is the lack of a decent search engine. In general, people fell back to Google because Reddit’s was abysmal.
So is Reddit gonna finally build something decent? Because if they don’t let Google index them, and they disabled Pushshift access, it’s gonna be hard to search the content.
I doubt Reddit builds a decent search engine, that doesn’t actually help them at all.
If users can search, they find a previous post pertaining to what they want to see/know and they move on.
If there’s no search, users can’t find old posts or comments so they make new posts about a previously posted topic and more comments are made as other users react. That’s more content, even if low quality from a user perspective, that shows engagement which can be sold to advertisers.That’s before considering the engineering effort it takes to make a good search engine, constantly fine tune that algorithm, and try to outpace those that are trying to game the search algorithm.
Did they improve their app after shutting down third party apps? I honestly don’t know but I’m thinking no and no to improving their search function.
Nope. I tried as a stopgap solution and it’s basically unusable. Literally unusable: sometimes after opening it from a deeplink from Google, the app can’t launch even after a force stop. It goes to a splash screen and calls itself “Popular” instead of Reddit, and the splash icon is some random community or user icon, and then crashes to home screen. No clearing cache gets you out of it, gotta clear data and sign in again. Not to mention, the horrible lag and slughishness.
They can’t fix theirs so instead of competing fairly, they shut down the API so you have no other option.
I’ve never used the official app. I’ve seen screenshots of it.
The search functionality shouldn’t be tied to the app, though. It’s done server-side.
They’re probably going to try to use GPT to build a quick and dirty search engine
Oh no that is a very bad idea. Google search is the only way to find things on reddit
This would be so fucking annoying, I don’t use reddit day to day anymore but it’s still a useful research tool when I see results from it on Google. I don’t hate their search feature quite as much as some but I still don’t want to use it most of the time.
This seems so dumb for them to do, I feel like having their content listed on search engines is s major advantage they have over Facebook et al.
over Facebook et al.
Public Facebook posts are indexed in Google. I think public groups are too. There’s just so much content (given how much larger Facebook is) that I doubt Google actually indexes every single public post.
Duckduckgo
If they block Google, they will likely block DDG an every other search engine.
You’ll probably need to be logged in to see anything with rate limits so bots can’t crawl the site.
I don’t think DDG runs its own indexer. It’s a frontend to other search engines.
Right; they mostly use Bing. Bing is the largest search engine that has an official API, so the majority of services that need search functionality use it, including voice assistants like Siri and Bixby, smaller search engines like DuckDuckGo, etc.
Well, that depends on how they implement the block, if its by domain or a blanket block (which would make sense, but I’ve seen weirder shit done online)
Fog, DuckDuckGo is bonkers useless for Reddit search
Search query site:reddit.com has entered the chatNever had an issue, but I guess to each their own
that’s literally the only reason i still end up visiting the site after I left it
Same, sometimes Google sends me to Reddit, it’s the only visits they get from me
That sounds like something someone who has never tried to use reddit’s own search would say.
Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything, if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.
On the one hand I really hope this happens. On the other hand, it would be devastating to the communities. But this shows how Reddit has the last say and can hold the content hostage on their platform. People need to stop using Reddit and switch to open and free alternatives, that is not controlled by a single entity / company. The problem is, there is lot of good legacy content and solutions that would be not available for most people searching the web.
But for the search engines who do not respect robot files, would still be able to index. Right? Ironically an AI could also write summaries…
Me to my little program for scraping some stories: “Hm, ‘Ignore robots.txt’? Sure, let’s do that by default please :D”
The only time I ever go onto Reddit is when I google something and it leads there
Reddit’s big claim to fame is having results show up in Google searches. Removing it would probably hurt Reddit (and to some extent Google). I’m just hoping that enough content gets indexed by Google for Lemmy and similar sites, as the best content creators don’t just reside on Reddit.
Dear Investors to Reddit’s upcoming IPO
We have been making some exciting changes to ready the company for our public offering. Please read on for the exciting details.
First, we want to reassure investors that we’ve worked hard since June, 2023 to alienate our most active users, who have been cluttering Reddit with non-profitable, straightforward discussion and help for years, and ensure that users cannot access our platform with reliable, convenient smartphone apps.
And we know it’s not enough to merely insult the people who have donated substantial parts of their lives to make our platform valuable; we’re also planning for the future. As you may have recently heard, we’re introducing a system to directly pay users who reliably produce the most attention-grabbing clickbait content. We are confident this will ensure that if those long-time users ever feel like returning, they will only find a hellscape of low-effort, reheated viral content and memes, accompanied by consistent, reliable comment sections of karma-farming bots and users.
But there’s more! We today announce that search engine users eventually will not be able to locate anything on the site, consistent with the existing experience for current on-site Reddit users. We know that a curated, managed experience is what most reliably leads to happy investors, so rest assured, we will be slowly cutting off all avenues for users to direct their own experience on Reddit. Yay!
As the IPO day nears, remember: when we are finished only the worst content will be available by an audience who can’t find us. Our core audience will be the users who remain trapped, Clockwork Orange-style, in an endless cycle of stimulation triggers structured to maximize ad viewing, in order to ensure our investors capture the maximum proportion of the site’s rapidly diminishing value. In other words, get ready to maximize ARPU, investors!
With these changes, invest with confidence. With geniuses like us at the helm, you can be sure line goes up.
Long live daddy Spez. Well said, looking forward to the IPO based on this.
You know what depresses me the most about the current world situation? That it might be go well after all anyway
I don’t think they can.
Reddit commits suicide, more at 11.
Pretty hard to kill yourself, when you are already dead. They are pretty much a zombie company at this point, much like X.
I was a reddit user for ages. Reddit search always sucked. Heck, Reddit could barely make their own data available to the users (which is why their user histories are so limited and why the GDPR takeouts take a week). Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, used external search engines.
Do they want to block external searches? Literally enshittify their shit further? Are they willing to hold back progress?
Just today I was thinking of Reddit Gold - back when I actually paid for it, the marketing spin was “you get to test new features before we add them to everyone else!” Literally none of the Gold features I’ve ever used made to the unwashed masses. I take it back, saving comments did.
So yeah, they will hold back progress. In fact, progress isn’t on the cards. It’s just regress. AND you can be a premium user and PAY for it.
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There was a time when it was free when you got awards if I’m not mistaken.
Yep, I’ve been gifted it once. I wasn’t really sure what the point was though, did it actually mean anything relevant?
You got into a super special sub full of shitposts lol. I posted once and ran away. I never paid for it but used to get it from awards. Then they made it paid only and there was never a reason to go back.
Back when reddit was smaller and more community driven, and went down more often, it was pretty much known to not do much. You got access to a gold subreddit and it was more or less a way to donate to a website you used a lot.
This made more sense when reddit was a small community driven upstart with frequent meetups, and secret santas, and a smaller feel.
Then reddit became one of the biggest websites on the web and I dont quite get why people kept doing it.
I remember that comments made in a post after you first visited were highlighted.
Well, since it seemed to be a way to support the site and get to see new features ahead of time, so yeah, why not? I only decided not to renew my gold access when it became very clear Spez wouldn’t ban the hate subs he loved.
As for getting gold otherwise:
I’m an introvert, ok? I mostly only comment if I have something worthwhile to say.
So the only comments I ever got gilded by others were drunken shitpost. And in one instance some random off the cuff post. …I don’t get it.
Anyway. Basically, I didn’t want to post any Gold Baits™. because that way lies madness.
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I love how you just try to be witty normally to get it. I remember being chuffed when I got platinum.
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Whelp with that I guess my leaving Reddit will go from 99% to 100%. Literally the only reason I’ve ever on that site is because I have a Google search result now. It was the last useful thing about it. Google has terrible results now and Reddit search is useless. They only work when together.
I will believe that Google can figure out a way to filter the spam – I mean, beating the spammers was their core value-add that made them what they are today. The spammers have pulled well ahead for maybe a year, but Google can maybe figure out a way to pull ahead again.
But there is no way that Reddit is going to be a reasonable forum site without a way to search it. Maybe it doesn’t have to be Google, but they have to have something sane.
Even aside from people searching, some people contribute specifically so that the information they provide can be found by people searching down the line. If it’s just going to a black hole…
I just don’t think Google cares anymore. They don’t have any legitimate competition. Their web browser dominates, their search is literally a verb now, and nobody’s changing anytime soon. The search has been terrible for a solid two years now and I just don’t see it getting any better. They have incentivized an entire industry designed to push low effort noise to the top for over a decade. It would take an unbelievable amount of work and dismantling said industry, or at least heavily augmenting it, to right the ship again.
What’s a “good” search engine these days?
Kagi.
Have you used Orion? Any good?
I have. It’s pretty good. I still use Firefox for most stuff, and like 5% of sites that I visit break in Orion, but other than that it’s very clean and easy. I like the side tabs, but it doesn’t completely replace Firefox for me yet. Seems close though!!!
None, to be honest. Google had the best 3-5 years ago. Downhill currently. I use DDG for privacy and just have to work a little harder to find what I want.
There’s one paid one I’ve seen people on HN recommend but it seems pretty fringe and more about being open source than being as good as google. Supposedly decent though. Can’t remember the name unfortunately.
Kagi is probably the paid one you have seen but it’s not open source. And it’s way better results. I make maybe 1 extra search for every 30 searches now compared to google where it was getting up to 3-5 extra searches every time I did a single search. Not sure of a better metric other than that.
Appreciate the info!
Yeah, I’m not specifically beating up on Google. No search engines are beating the spammers right now.
Beyond not using reddit, and only landing on reddit when a search engine leads me to it directly, I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
From people that don’t use Reddit regularly, the only way they have ever heard about it is from Google results. So good luck with unloading a whole clip into your foot guys 🙄
They’re going for the tommygun-barrelmag combo to ensure there’s nothing left of that damn foot, then cry for sympathy money.
Fuck you Spez.
Am I the only one that regularly used “search phrase site:reddit.com” on Google? It makes the search engine so much better.
Really bad idea to get rid of this feature.
definitely not, i used this a ton too. it’s obvious reddit is just getting greedy
