cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/317922
Alternate title: Google admits Reddit protests make it harder to find helpful search results
Search engines have been becoming increasingly useless for years at this point as SEO gentrification runs rampant and more content moves behind walled gardens like Discord and anything that requires a subscription. Not to mention that Google enshittifies just like everything else. The amount of overly verbose garbage I have to trek through just to not get an answer to my query is far too high. God fucking help us now that AI can generate content, which will be even more garbage to sift through.
You know, that was a good article until the author took a completely unnecessary and irrelevant swipe at Biden; at which point I completely lost interest in anything the author had to say.
I’m really fucking tired of political bullshit being embedded into every-goddamned-thing I read.
You know, that was a good article until the author took a completely unnecessary and irrelevant swipe at Biden; at which point I completely lost interest in anything the author had to say.
It was good during and after that part too.
I’m really fucking tired of political bullshit being embedded into every-goddamned-thing I read.
lmao. You are in a thread about a protest and its consequences reading an article from a socialist magazine about capitalism and its detrimental effects on search engines. You are very clearly not tired of reading about politics, but instead are just upset that your guy got off-handedly dunked on. It was an extremely small portion of the article. Get over it dude.
Biden’s not my guy. He’s way too far to the right for me, and way too interested in maintaining the status quo. Give me a leader that doesn’t mind breaking a few noses and telling the GOP exactly where they can shove their christofascist bullshit.
But the unnecessary, irrelevant jab was just lazy, shitty writing; trying to score a couple giggle points at the cost of the author’s journalistic integrity. It was out of place, hamfisted, and just plain lazy.
Besides, the internet is bigger than US politics. I’m sure Brazil or Luxembourg doesn’t give a shit about our politics insofar as it doesn’t affect them.
Give me a leader that doesn’t mind breaking a few noses and telling the GOP exactly where they can shove their christofascist bullshit.
So beating ass and putting dipshits in their place is fine, yet an article writer making a less than one sentence dunk on a politician is a step too far? Bro, if you were a Biden fan your butthurt would at least be understandable, but this is just dumb. Reconsider what you are doing. And to reiterate: get over it.
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Oh boo hoo. I would have bitched if it was a completely-out-of-place swipe at any politician, even ones I hate. I would have bitched just as much if it was an anti-trump joke. It was irrelevant and obnoxious, shitty, opportunistic writing.
I don’t give fuck one about Biden, but I do give fuck one about journalistic integrity, which the author seems to lack.
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Yes. It is completely irrelevant to the point.
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I remember using the internet before smartphones were ubiquitous. At the time, I was thinking that we would be entering a period of unprecedented enlightenment with all the easy access to all the information a person could want. Lol. Lmao.
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Sometimes it just straight up ignores my search modifiers to send me shit. I know the tech illiterate need their hands held, but bruh.
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It feels like AI wrote it already. Try googling a windows error now. Instead of getting forums or a blog you get 10 shitty websites with lists of generic fixes that end with them recommending their shitty software that will absolutely not fix your issue.
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I can’t trust a single thing that pops up on google because everything is auto generated blog spam
And regarding reddit, moderation keeps reddit at a good quality but if reddit takes away moderators tools and introduces more intrusive ads it will become low quality and untrustworthy as well
Edit: fixed typo
You’ve got a typo. I assume you mean intrusive ads.
Thanks, fixed!
Some Reddit posts are already at an all time low in quality. Places like r/worldnews, r/technology or ELI5, where you used to find “at least” a couple decent comments, have already seen top posts with 0 useful top comments… and I’ve looked through all of them out of morbid curiosity, but no, not a single one.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan reportedly said.
Their search has been getting worse and worse for a long time before the Reddit protest.
“Many of us may wonder,” yep. Some of us are pretty sure it’s because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They’re very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.
You know, that makes me wonder if someone could figure out the old google search algorithm, and use it to make a new, more useful search engine.
IIRC PageRank was patented, so it’s public, and at this point the patent is surely expired.
A lot of the cost is data storage. Unfortunately, I doubt any party will replace old Google.
Storage isn’t as expensive as it used to be, especially if you were to only store text. I feel like nowadays the main costs would be bandwidth and processing, since there are many more websites out there, and they’re much bigger, full of many more scripts to make sense of.
I recently googled “grass” to find out more about different species and the results were all trying to sell me grass.
Grass.
Where I live it’s as common as dirt. I wonder how many people Google the word “grass” with zero qualifiers when trying to BUY grass.
Ffs
This made me curious. A while back, I decided that I’d had enough with lousy results. I started trying different search engines, and I landed on DuckDuckGo.
After reading your comment, I went and searched the same term, grass. At the top, it showed a short section of ‘products’ and one ad. The next result was a store, then Britannica’s article on grass. Fourth result was Wikipedia.
I figure that a ‘products’ link and one ad, clearly labeled, is reasonable. After all, the search engine is free.
“But have you considered special-edition artisanal grass? Guaranteed to impress your neighbors! Practically mows itself! Thrives on zero water! [in small print: made of 100% high grade polypropylene filaments, not suitable for hot climates].” [/s]
For that kind of research, I usually go to Wikipedia, pick a random technical term for the topic I’m looking for, and add that. It doesn’t always work, but it does eliminate some of the sales sites. But it shouldn’t be necessary, sigh.
Ironically, reddit’s search feature was also trash. If I wanted to find something on reddit I just went to google and appended “reddit”.
IIRC, they cited google as a reason not to work on their own search, since that’s what most of their userbase had got used to searching reddit with anyway by that point.
Reddit also cited 3rd party apps, bots and extensions as a reason to not develop many of the features on their own… and here we are now.
Yeah, what the heck happened? Google can’t search for crap, and Amazon can’t ship items for crap.
Google as a search engine is more or less dead. I was only really using Google to search reddit. Now that I’m done with reddit… There goes Google.
Google removing the “do no evil” from their ethos was a very clear indication of the direction they were heading.
“Don’t be evil” is still in Google’s Code of Conduct, it’s just been at the end of the document rather than the start since 2018.
Google did evil shit before and after the change, it’s not quite the big deal that some people make it out to be!
Hm. Still, that’s about the time that a trend in the company shifted.
I used to think that Google seemed to be trying to be decent in various ways. It’s quite a challenge for a large, for-profit. The attempts showed.
I don’t see that anymore.
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What’s your preferred alternative? I use DuckDuckGo, and it’s… OK. I still often switch over to Google when I’m having a hard time finding relevant results on DDG.
DDG works really good in my opinion. I rarely use google, and if I do use it, I find the results almost always lacking too. The only time when google is better, is if I’m looking to purchase something, and want to find a place that sells the product I’m looking for.
Try Kagi. It costs money, but it is worth it.
Presearch
Checked it out, stopped reading at “blockchain”.
Blockchain it’s the future.
Why? Do you oppose blockchain technology?
I like the idea, but I’m not convinced that the model is robust at this point. It seems awfully easy for a person to pretend to be part of the community and mess with the outcome.
SearXNG. It’s a meta-search aggregator, you can use any public instance (the config is all in-browser) or host your own for kind of extra privacy.
It seems to depend on the type of search. For ordinary information, I’m using DuckDuckGo. For shopping, I go to Google, but the results aren’t great. I’m undecided for serious research.
@Raeyin Try Startpage
What are you using now?
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Trying out alternatives now. Kagi does seem interesting.
What search engine(s) do you normally use?
The article starts with absolute non-news: To get results on reddit.com you should addd
site:reddit.comto your search, not justReddit.Unfortunately, I think this is a disadvantage of the Fediverse when it comes to search: The “site:” operator won’t work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.
Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like
scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search. E.g.DIY Esp8266 camera activator scope:fediverse,scope:lemmyor maybescope:diasporaI never bothered with that. All my results were from reddit.com anyway with just appending reddit to the end. Even Bing chat would add reddit to the end of search for you without asking.
he “site:” operator won’t work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.
Agreed, that’s the problem.
Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search.
Also agreed, that would be a solution. I’m doubtful wether they deem a particular network important enough to justify the extra effort on their part.
Is it possible to pipe search queries through a website? If yes, then let’s make a
fedi-search! In which you can find any publicly available fediverse content.Would it then be possible to google for
site:fedi-search?Add a new, flexible operator, like
scopeThat sounds like an interesting idea. I wonder if it could be proposed to DDG, or added as an extra filter to the likes of SearXNG.
The cynic in me sees a symbiotic relationship between Google and Reddit.
I started messing around on Reddit around 2007, but it felt like a firehose. Google’s results covered what I was looking for to the extent that I didn’t need a second source for most searches, and my job involved reading the AP wire, so I was decently covered on news with additional RSS feeds at home.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m noticing the pattern that most genuinely helpful information is coming from Reddit (as well as no longer being in a newsroom), so I join, and the experience is far better with subreddits (sorry, hipsters). It wasn’t yet readily apparent that Reddit was not only getting better at being comprehensive, but Google was also getting worse.
In the late beforetimes, maybe 2019, Google became useful for searching Reddit and finding product information for items I already knew about. And nothing else. Even with coding questions, there are a lot of red herrings. Without Reddit results, I’d have noticed Google’s search irrelevance far earlier.
I think it’s a bold move for Google to present Perspectives as a new feature to improve user experience when really, it just makes it easier for them to present sponsored content in different formats. Astroturfed advertisments (fake “ordinary customer reviews,” usually) have been a thing on social media for ages, especially on YouTube, and Perspectives is just giving Google a creative way to get eyeballs on those ads.
Using the Reddit implosion as a jumping off point is also clever, and I think it’s evidence that Google doesn’t plan on paying for API access next month, or ever. They don’t want to take advantage of Reddit’s data, they just want to take back the eyeballs that Reddit attracts.
(… not that Reddit was ever immune to astroturfing, of course, but I think strong community moderation made it better than YouTube, which doesn’t give users much opportunity to get rid of fake reviews. Now that they have chased off a lot of mods and nerfed their tools, I expect the authenticity of Reddit product reviews to decrease dramatically).
Too late. On the advice of another Lemmy thread, I started trying Kagi a couple weeks ago, for exactly this reason. I highly doubt I’ll come back; it’s been working great for me, and given how important search is to me both personally and professionally, it’s easily, easily worth the price.
I add site names to searches all the time. For example, if you want medical information instead of advertisements for dick pills, you can add “site:nih.gov” to your search
