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howrar ,

Are we looking at a future where we need a search engine to tell us which search engine to use for your queries?

LukeZaz ,

I think we’re looking at a future where Google ensures we don’t ever have to worry about making such a choice.

howrar ,

Microsoft is working very hard at getting into this data game. Don’t think they won’t try making similar deals.

jarfil ,

No, don’t worry. The AI will pick one for us.

theangriestbird OP ,

If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward.

Can anyone confirm this? I typically use DDG, and I tried verifying this, but i’m not sure what to search on reddit that would exclusively bring up results from the past week. Seems like most of the time I’m reading posts from a year ago or more anyway, so it’s hard to see the effect immediately.

noodlejetski ,

cropped screenshot of DuckDuckGo’s tool for limiting search results to a certain period - any time/past day/past week/past month/past year

theangriestbird OP ,

aha. yeah that does it. i guess i never used that previously, so i have no comparison point for how well it worked before this deal. But sure enough, i get no results when searching very generic terms and filter to just the last week.

BarCart ,

I’m just getting the Jimmy Carter and Trans wiki pages regardless of what I search for, regardless of which browser I use lol. I mean, not irrelevant to me but not super helpful.

Firefox https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/eefdaa72-c833-4516-a704-d93c62393d70.webp

Chrome (Private) https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/171a4b96-f4cf-45cf-b620-a09c913f76ec.webp

kindenough ,

Reddit search, notorious for being shit, has upgraded to a top tier shit pile.

dragynbob ,

I don’t have a ton of knowledge in this area, but this seems like it should run afoul of antitrust regulations?

theangriestbird OP ,

That was my first thought too. Yet another reason to vote for Dems this November - only one party actually gives a shit about enforcing antitrust regulations!

daniyyel ,

Who should be regulated, Google or Reddit? Reddit updated there robots.txt to disallow everything. As it’s their site, I guess it’s also their right to determine that. They then made a deal with Google, which I guess is also not abusing a dominant position by Google, as Reddit could have made a deal with anyone.

daniyyel , (edited )

It’s a bit of a dilemma reading their policy:

We believe in the open internet and in keeping Reddit publicly accessible to foster human learning (…) Unfortunately, we see more and more entities using unauthorized access (…) especially with the rise of use cases like generative AI. This sort of misuse of public data has become more prominent as more and more platforms close themselves off from the open internet.
We still believe in an open internet, but we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it’s public.

Being a open/public platform, but still wanting to protect user’s content from being used for AI could be a good thing, and I guess also what many fediverse users would want for this platform. Making a distinction between AI and search indexing could indeed be difficult. But then making content deals with Google for search indexing and AI training is a bit hypocrite.

PotentiallyApricots ,

Ummmmmmmm. This seems illegal. Is this not illegal?

lemmyvore ,

It’s not a big deal… for now, because most of the time when I limit DDG results I ask for 1 year back (for solutions that are sort of recent but not ancient).

I would never limit results to just the last week, and typically posts that are that fresh won’t have enough accumulated knowledge so even if they pop up on the results they’re not really useful.

Again, that’s just my experience. I’m curious if others have similar ones.

Catsrules ,

True but It will become a bigger deal every passing day that is the problem.

I also wonder if search engine’s will delist results after a period of time. If the site is blocking them. After all you don’t want your top results to just be 404s all of the time.

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