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captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

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 ,

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.

aspensmonster ,
@aspensmonster@lemmygrad.ml avatar

I use Kagi:

kagi.com

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

SMT42 ,

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 ,

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.

NevermindNoMind ,

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.

Dakta ,
@Dakta@lemmy.ml avatar

That’s why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.

TrickyCamel ,

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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MargotRobbie ,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

That’s way too straight forward for Kojima. You need at least 3 more hours of cutscenes.

danciestlobster ,

It’s so accurate it hurts me

dysorder ,

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

Dezzillion ,

Months? You mean weeks.

dox ,

Are you saying they were going to… regReddit?

Pulsar ,

First they will rename it few times, Reddit+, RedditOut, RedditWave then merge it will Google Groups wait for a year and then pull the plug.

YoBuckStopsHere ,
@YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world avatar

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.

MysteriousSophon21 ,

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

swan_pr ,
@swan_pr@lemmy.world avatar

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

Wolfram ,

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 ,

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.

qimdbxfk6 ,

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’.

ward2k ,

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

Aetina ,

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.

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Sterben ,
@Sterben@lemmy.world avatar

We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)

snek ,
@snek@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Zeus ,

i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling “how to x site:reddit.com”, we’ll just fedisearch “how to x”

in fact, i’m pretty sure i already found one but it wasn’t very good, and i’ve forgotten it’s name

Penryn_ ,

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.

pete ,

Ai isn’t going to fix the first page being all ads, that’s a business decision.

If they wanted to return actual content they could do that without AI.

amonkeyfullofbarrels ,

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.

figaro ,

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.

Risk ,

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.

shiftenter ,
@shiftenter@kbin.social avatar

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.

YouveCatToBeKittenMe ,
@YouveCatToBeKittenMe@kbin.social avatar

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 ,

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.

static ,
@static@kbin.social avatar

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.

IceCapp ,

Reddit.com appears on KilledByGoogle.com next year.

iamsgod ,

remove the adds

lol, this is google we're talking about

Grumlin ,
@Grumlin@kbin.social avatar

Knowing google they would buy it, release a big roadmap of plans for the website and then shut it down the next day.

Tenthrow ,
@Tenthrow@lemmy.world avatar

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 ,

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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