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).
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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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.
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?
That's why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.
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.
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.
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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.
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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
Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.
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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’.
Yeah, no kidding. Google's been getting lazy with its search results. The first dozen hits on most Google searches are either YouTube or Reddit results.
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.
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.
Say the execs of the company who has ruined the internet with seo crap.
Big suprise! I'm this close to Uninstaller reddit.
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.
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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
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.
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....?
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