this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

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[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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?

[–] mioko@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

[–] itsJoelleScott@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Ecosia has been pretty okay for me. Additionally, they are a non-profit that plants trees based off user usage.

[–] httpjames@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] aspensmonster@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I use Kagi:

https://kagi.com/

You gotta pay for it, but I've found it worth paying for so far.

[–] SMT42@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] alejandro@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] refugeered@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Dakta@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Startpage is pretty good.

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[–] Tenthrow@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] drphungky@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] favrion@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

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?

[–] YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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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[–] Gentoo1337@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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).

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[–] W6KME@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.

[–] swan_pr@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] dysorder@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.

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[–] Wolfram@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

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.

[–] achensherd@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] shiftenter@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] MrGG@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Dezzillion@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Big suprise! I'm this close to Uninstaller reddit.

[–] synthy@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

No shit lol

[–] Verqix@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] dezmd@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] NutWrench@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sacredbirdman@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.

[–] Landrin201@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Infinity13@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Yep now Google is 99% useless. Bunch of AI written nonsense

[–] ngwoo@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] cpt_kierk@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

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