Just goes to show how bad Google has been for a while. If one site going down (in this case, only partially) kills that much of your search engine's usability, then you've got a search engine to fix.
Just goes to show how bad Google has been for a while. If one site going down (in this case, only partially) kills that much of your search engine's usability, then you've got a search engine to fix.
On the contrary, I think it speaks to how necessary and sought-after guaranteed actual-human information is. Reddit's communities did the leg work of having genuine, non-advert-based information...
Exemplary
On the contrary, I think it speaks to how necessary and sought-after guaranteed actual-human information is. Reddit's communities did the leg work of having genuine, non-advert-based information that could be easily parsed through to find what was needed. There was inherent trust in it, or at least the people that posted there.
Where else can you go to find reviews of products that you know for a fact aren't either outright fake or paid-for? Even if you're like "huh, this guy sounds like a shill" you can then quickly check the poster's history and see if it's a real account-- an actual person.
A nonzero chunk of the issue is still in Google's court, in that reddit was often the only source they were surfacing that had the human element. There's more to the web than SEO-riddled blog...
A nonzero chunk of the issue is still in Google's court, in that reddit was often the only source they were surfacing that had the human element. There's more to the web than SEO-riddled blog spam, but since we're all stuck to the habit of using Google, what opportunity is there to find them?
Chicken and Egg, though. Good niche sites died because the Google algo allowed hyper-SEO'd trash sites to supersede them in the rankings, so now there's nearly no good authentic sites centered...
Chicken and Egg, though.
Good niche sites died because the Google algo allowed hyper-SEO'd trash sites to supersede them in the rankings, so now there's nearly no good authentic sites centered around niche topics other than Reddit - which had the benefit of a self-sustaining community & content stream regardless of access to google traffic.
This has the right of it, in my opinion. I used to run tiny independent guide websites for whatever games I was into at the time, and it became harder and harder for me to compete. Eventually it...
This has the right of it, in my opinion. I used to run tiny independent guide websites for whatever games I was into at the time, and it became harder and harder for me to compete. Eventually it got to the point where I just posted them directly to Reddit, because they'd actually get used, there.
I can't speak to everyone's experience, but the tactics for rigging SEO absolutely crushed my ability to get seen, even if I googled my specific website's name. I admit SEO has always been a weak spot of mine, but what I did used to be enough, once upon a time. Not anymore, not for years.
Yep, I remember reading stories in the past from people who made money creating niche sites and running ads on them. It wasn't crazy money, but it was enough to make it worth it, and it provided...
Yep, I remember reading stories in the past from people who made money creating niche sites and running ads on them. It wasn't crazy money, but it was enough to make it worth it, and it provided good, human-generated content for the web.
As an example, I'm replaying FFT and I wanted to read some long form analysis of the character of Delita. About two pages of Reddit and GameFAQs results, two articles, and just gibbering nonsense...
As an example, I'm replaying FFT and I wanted to read some long form analysis of the character of Delita. About two pages of Reddit and GameFAQs results, two articles, and just gibbering nonsense by the third page. I know for a fact there's a corpus of information out there, and I'm sure if I tinker with the search I can make it better. But damn, Google has become absolutely useless.
My workplace company has started to put out ads on Bing for the first time, and according to our SEO guy Bing traffic is growing. Bing used to be a laughing stock used by my grandma or people who...
My workplace company has started to put out ads on Bing for the first time, and according to our SEO guy Bing traffic is growing.
Bing used to be a laughing stock used by my grandma or people who didn't know how to change the default. But now I kind of get it. I am tempted to switch to Bing. I have to wonder if a site without that much monolith power and influence, with different algorithms, will give me different content I wouldn't find otherwise. And less ads, maybe.
Bing has integrated their chat with search well, especially if you use their app or Microsoft Edge. I actually started using Edge just to use the chat since it uses GPT-4, which is the only place...
Bing has integrated their chat with search well, especially if you use their app or Microsoft Edge. I actually started using Edge just to use the chat since it uses GPT-4, which is the only place I can use it for free if you don't want to spent money buying credits on OpenAI. I used ChatGPT for a while but I barely even open it after I started using Bing Chat. It's what I'm assuming Google wants to do with Bard and their future vision of chat-based search, but Bing is already there.
I was skeptical about chat-based search being the new way people search, but I was imagining it being similar to the response you get from Google Assistant, which has been slower and less useful than doing a search yourself. But with looking something up with GPT-4 chat means that it does the browsing for you. It processes the results and gives you the condensed version, which is what you're generally looking for, without having to read filler content or keyword-stuffed SEO bullshit. It also links to the references, so if it's a topic important enough that you would want to fact-check it, you can go through the source yourself. And it does this with multiple sources.
I'm not sure if the chat traffic is counted towards overall Bing traffic, but I see websites that will have to modify their content to be the sources that's picked up by the algorithms of the chat search, instead of writing something that would be directly read by people. I haven't seen much discussion around this, any SEO-GPT discussions are geared towards using GPT to increase SEO rankings, which sure, might be effective now, but I don't think it's sustainable because SEO-focused content has already degraded the quality of search results and I think the future might actually be people not reading any of it directly at all but rather through ChatGPT-style chatbots. I don't know if it's great for developing reading comprehension, which I feel is on a downward trend in general, but it is where I see the future of search going.
I've been using Bing and DuckDuckGo for a month and am happy with it. I don't search much because I already have a bunch of sites I need bookmarked, but it is serving me well. I just stopped using...
I've been using Bing and DuckDuckGo for a month and am happy with it. I don't search much because I already have a bunch of sites I need bookmarked, but it is serving me well.
I just stopped using Google search one day and I don't miss it.
i almost exclusively use osm for maps, because the maps tend to be better, even if 98% of info is super accurate on both, it's the last 2% that generally does it for me. part of that might be my...
i almost exclusively use osm for maps, because the maps tend to be better, even if 98% of info is super accurate on both, it's the last 2% that generally does it for me. part of that might be my habits though; i've seen the rankings, suggested things, and whatever gamed so much on google maps (e.g. "highest rated restaurants in the area") that i just inherently don't trust them any more. so i only really use maps for looking up addresses, or routing information. and another reason i might not be standard for routing info: 9/10 times i'm looking for vague directions so i can get to my end destination in a meandering way instead of the quickest (and often most boring) way possible. i like taking the detour, unless i need to be somewhere quick, in which case my local knowledge is good enough to get me there without maps.
drive/docs, in my experience, is a network effect thing. i've been using a personal nextcloud instance for a while, and it mostly works really nice. no collaborative writing though, so can't touch on that
I tried OSM for maps; its actually the only point I haven't been able to divorce Google (I use a hybrid of Maps and Waze on GrapheneOS). It's complete trash for monitoring traffic conditions, and...
I tried OSM for maps; its actually the only point I haven't been able to divorce Google (I use a hybrid of Maps and Waze on GrapheneOS). It's complete trash for monitoring traffic conditions, and since I commute about 120 mi (~190 km) a day, I'm not about to sit still when I could have known what was really ahead.
I used osmand for quite some time and for navigation is good enough. The good thing on Google Maps is the ratings and to know if something is open or not. I get a lot of wrong info because people...
I used osmand for quite some time and for navigation is good enough. The good thing on Google Maps is the ratings and to know if something is open or not. I get a lot of wrong info because people don't update, but at least there is some info.
I gave Bing a fair shot a couple of months ago. The regular search results are ok but multi-keyword searches require specific syntax. That in itself is not a deal breaker but presents a...
I gave Bing a fair shot a couple of months ago. The regular search results are ok but multi-keyword searches require specific syntax. That in itself is not a deal breaker but presents a significant barrier of entry to many people. The real issue is how often you rely on search results to be enriched with Google Maps which is so far ahead of everybody it's not even funny. Having to go back all the time was what broke me ultimately.
I have found Bing to be more useful if I am resorting to using a search engine. It seems to listen much closer than Google, I'm really not sure what has happened at Google but they appear to...
I have found Bing to be more useful if I am resorting to using a search engine. It seems to listen much closer than Google, I'm really not sure what has happened at Google but they appear to ignore a lot of what you specify even if you know how to use a search engine and its various operators.
Bing is by no means perfect but it does seem more useful. I often have to track down car parts based on model numbers, use image search to narrow down parts that change slightly during facelift years etc and Google is basically hopeless for it, Bing is the only place I stand a chance of success. Google seems to think it's a shopping site or something.
Remember "if it's not on the first two pages of google it doesn't exist"? Now a search result for a small string will sometimes just say "nope, doesn't exist" or I'll get a page of "Untitled" (wtf...
Remember "if it's not on the first two pages of google it doesn't exist"?
Now a search result for a small string will sometimes just say "nope, doesn't exist" or I'll get a page of "Untitled" (wtf even are those??) then I ADD a word to the search and suddenly it brings some results up. Adding a word is generally supposed to help narrow a search down so wtf.
Exactly. If Google would rank down sites that are overly wordy on domains that contain "too much content overall", they'd instantly throw out virtually all generated spam, and hence also...
Exactly. If Google would rank down sites that are overly wordy on domains that contain "too much content overall", they'd instantly throw out virtually all generated spam, and hence also indirectly boost smaller blogs and all.
I kind of feel like if it was that simple it'd be done already - if there's an algorithm, there's a way to optimize your site for it. Currently the alg rewards verbose sites with heavy keywording,...
I kind of feel like if it was that simple it'd be done already - if there's an algorithm, there's a way to optimize your site for it.
Currently the alg rewards verbose sites with heavy keywording, so that's currently the style showing up at the top. Back when the alg rewarded interlinking, you'd get blogrings and a million and one interlinks seeded into the text, before that it was tags and keyword spam blocks in the article footer. If they changed the rules to punish excessive wordy sites, then the SEO'd sites would learn how much text is too much, how much is not enough, and hover exactly within the golden range.
I think part of the problem is that they're not rotating rules rapidly enough, and trying to stabilize sites across rules changes. Like, assuming here, I think that a site too-heavily optimized for a specific google pagerank algorithm would absolutely plummet in rankings if assessed by a different metric, where a "normal" site would probably hold a much more static ranking position.
The other thing I think holds 'normal' sites down is that once a site is absolutely great, people stop using google to reach it - they use the site and go directly. If it weren't a privacy nightmare and engines were able to see how much direct traffic occurred, that should be a strong factor in page rank. I'm not going to return multiple times to a site that's SEO'd bullshit, but if it's a good resource to something I need, I'll be back several times and just go directly after the first one or two.
It is! It was my reddit handle as well, I snagged it in like ... first year Uni. I was glad to grab it here as well. Whenever someone says anything I always feel like I need explain myself~! - I...
It is! It was my reddit handle as well, I snagged it in like ... first year Uni. I was glad to grab it here as well.
Whenever someone says anything I always feel like I need explain myself~! - I picked it after like book two in MBotF, after the character had like thirty pages of appearance, while the series was still niche and nearly unheard of. My motivation was that he wasn't a total dickbag and his name sounded dope when said out loud. I was almost "Kallor" except that dude is a knob.
In hindsight to the full series now, "Anomander" feels about as original as if I picked "Superman" for my username.
Hah. True. But if I had based my username on Malazan I probably would have gone with one of my favorite characters, either Kruppe or Tehol Beddict, who are rather OP themselves right from the...
In hindsight to the full series now, "Anomander" feels about as original as if I picked "Superman" for my username.
Hah. True. But if I had based my username on Malazan I probably would have gone with one of my favorite characters, either Kruppe or Tehol Beddict, who are rather OP themselves right from the get-go... so I have no room to criticize your choice of going with Anomander. :P
Google used to show you all kinds of niche technical forums with answers. Those still exist somewhat, google is just hiding them to prefer spam AI article websites and reddit. So of course reddit...
Google used to show you all kinds of niche technical forums with answers.
Those still exist somewhat, google is just hiding them to prefer spam AI article websites and reddit.
I've lost count of the number of times that I've searched for the solution to a problem, and found a Stack Overflow page with a similar problem that has not quite the right solution, and then 25...
Those still exist somewhat, google is just hiding them to prefer spam AI article websites and reddit.
I've lost count of the number of times that I've searched for the solution to a problem, and found a Stack Overflow page with a similar problem that has not quite the right solution, and then 25 random websites with names like "techsupport 247" that have just copied the top answer from that SO page into something vaguely resembling a blog post. I hate the modern web.
Most of the time,you even have to add "reddit" to a query for some search engine magic. Of course you can't do that if you don't know the name of the niche forum you really need right now. I...
Most of the time,you even have to add "reddit" to a query for some search engine magic. Of course you can't do that if you don't know the name of the niche forum you really need right now.
I suppose what google - or a competitor who wants to eat their lunch - needs to do is add an option to classify website types. Adding the "wiki" keyword works well, because that keyword appears all over the relevant sites. But I can't put a filter like "blog" or "forum" or "community" or "journalism" or "OEM" on it without inviting meta-results about these sources rather than from them.
The ML technology to make it happen exists. Just chuck a parse of the website into a transformer and it can easily tell you what's going on.
Google used to have this feature and they removed it. You could filter by the "Discussion" category. I used it all the time and I'm still pissed they removed it.
Google used to have this feature and they removed it. You could filter by the "Discussion" category. I used it all the time and I'm still pissed they removed it.
For finding niche content, try Marginalia. I don't know how well it works for technical stuff, but it's been great for finding smaller websites I wouldn't find on any of the major search engines....
For finding niche content, try Marginalia. I don't know how well it works for technical stuff, but it's been great for finding smaller websites I wouldn't find on any of the major search engines. I hate being restricted to just a couple of websites when there are so many good ones out there that also produce good, if not sometimes better content.
Not actively I think. I suspect rather they laid off the people who were continously playing a highly specific cat&mouse game, and this in turn opened up their algorithm to be black-box tested...
google is just hiding them to prefer spam AI article websites
Not actively I think. I suspect rather they laid off the people who were continously playing a highly specific cat&mouse game, and this in turn opened up their algorithm to be black-box tested until the spammers found out just how to generate their spam-pages to boost them all the way to the top.
I grew up using forums and there will be niche technical answers of my own littered about the web. But these days with google when linked to forums I often find my self greeted with "this problem...
I grew up using forums and there will be niche technical answers of my own littered about the web. But these days with google when linked to forums I often find my self greeted with "this problem has already been answered multiple times on this forum, use the search function". When I try to use the search function I'm told I need to register an account first.
When I try to use google to limit searches for that domain I get nonsense or links to threads that were deleted etc. I think some of those forums were quite restrictive with robots.txt and other mechanisms such that only unregistered user areas were indexed.
The forum posts can also be very outdated, and while that forum might have a more up to date response, again I can't use their search function.
Forums are also a pain compared with threaded discussions in mailing lists, usenet, slashdot and reddit. You might need to wade through 20 pages of nonsense before finding a real answer.
To me it's like Google is the automated answering service, and a place like Reddit is an actual person on the line you can speak to. Of course I'm going to prefer speaking to an actual person to...
To me it's like Google is the automated answering service, and a place like Reddit is an actual person on the line you can speak to. Of course I'm going to prefer speaking to an actual person to get what I need.
Hopefully Tildes can become a place like that one day, where almost all my searches for products/services include a "tildes" on the end.
This is it, if you don't append 'reddit' to your searches you'll get pages of useless Quora results, pinterest results etc. Even a lot of the official tech support forums are hopeless, I'm...
This is it, if you don't append 'reddit' to your searches you'll get pages of useless Quora results, pinterest results etc.
Even a lot of the official tech support forums are hopeless, I'm specifically thinking of Microsoft's where you seem to stand a very slim chance of finding the solution on page 18 after a zillion replies telling people to run sfc /scannow.
The web is pretty broken due to having so few places to actually discuss things these days and the search tools we do have are pretty much broken due to decades of 'optimization'.
None, because if anything Bing - and by extension DDG - showcase that you can always do worse than Google, at least for all my gaming/programming/pet/cooking related questions. 😂
There's more to the web than SEO-riddled blog spam, but since we're all stuck to the habit of using Google, what opportunity is there to find them?
None, because if anything Bing - and by extension DDG - showcase that you can always do worse than Google, at least for all my gaming/programming/pet/cooking related questions. 😂
I recently moved all of my searching to a local instance of SearXNG, which collates results from dozens of search engines and feeds false data to each, to anonymize them. I'm actually pretty happy...
I recently moved all of my searching to a local instance of SearXNG, which collates results from dozens of search engines and feeds false data to each, to anonymize them. I'm actually pretty happy with the results for web, but news and images is far from perfect.
There seems to be a lot less. People resorted to appending 'reddit' to the end of their searches due to reddit replacing most of the places that previously had useful information. A lot of the...
There seems to be a lot less. People resorted to appending 'reddit' to the end of their searches due to reddit replacing most of the places that previously had useful information. A lot of the forums etc where you would find the same thing pre-reddit are gone.
Of course in the pre-reddit days Google seemed a lot more efficient at finding these forums, nowadays you add reddit not just because it replaced so many forums but because the rest of the results Google indexes are basically useless. Think Quora etc.
The web is a mess and we did it to ourselves more or less, we can try to blame Google etc and it does share some blame but we didn't value what we had and this is the result, page after page of useless spam.
Every major game overhaul/mod moving to Discord is one of the worst things to happen in the history of humanity. I'm being a little hyperbolic, but holy shit it's awful. I'm playing a WIP Elden...
Exemplary
Every major game overhaul/mod moving to Discord is one of the worst things to happen in the history of humanity.
I'm being a little hyperbolic, but holy shit it's awful. I'm playing a WIP Elden Ring mod, I'm curious on how to get a spell since it's not in the right place, I have to go to the Discord, react to a message, agree to TOS, figure out which channel to search, and then if I'm lucky someone has (vaguely recently) asked about it. If not, I have to ask and hope that someone responds soon.
Discord isn't a forum replacement and was never meant to be, but some-fucking-how that's the way everything is going. I love Discord as the Skype+IRC replacement we desperately needed, but it never should have become this community-focused grab bag of bullshit. Every server has it's own rules and way that things are handled, there's no consistency between what bots/commands are used in any of them, nothing is indexed anywhere, and I still hate avatars and wish they would go away.
I would love to talk to someone who started a public Discord community for a specific niche interest pre-pandemic, when it wasn't nearly as popular. I imagine it started as a cleaner IRC replacement, which made onboarding new users easier, but as Discord grew it just... eugh.
Shit sucks. Discord's ubiquity really gets me heated.
I was having a struggle the other night trying to find information about a particular niche. I search and start reading back through the logs because I think I'm close to finding it, but it's...
I was having a struggle the other night trying to find information about a particular niche. I search and start reading back through the logs because I think I'm close to finding it, but it's taking forever as I'm having to scroll through so much off-topic chat and memes. I then run into some unfamiliar terms that are also particular to this niche and might be relevant. Do I search to find out what those mean and lose my place here? Do I copy/paste a chunk of the chat to help find my way back, or do I pull out my phone so I can have a second instance of Discord just to do the search?
I'm with you, seeing how much information gets buried in Discord upsets me.
I really hate Discord as well and it's troubling to see it used as a forum or at least for similar functions to a forum. Non-indexed, usually gated, requires a specific application to access,...
I really hate Discord as well and it's troubling to see it used as a forum or at least for similar functions to a forum.
Non-indexed, usually gated, requires a specific application to access, requires an account to access, requires an invite (in most cases) to access...
If it does have what you are looking for then good luck finding it (and which channel it is in) between all the usual user chat, memes, links etc...
As if the web wasn't bad enough. Then, as if you needed, it the final kick in the teeth from this hateful service is that you jump through all the hoops and find that the Discord application won't even save your settings if you use it's "Log out" feature so enjoy all that beeping and bopping, flashing notifications etc if you ever log in again.
I have to ask, why does it actually happen for smaller stuff? I get it for large companies. The lack of legacy can be preferrable to large companies in regards to having full control of their...
I have to ask, why does it actually happen for smaller stuff?
I get it for large companies. The lack of legacy can be preferrable to large companies in regards to having full control of their published information even into the future, being able to re-publish as required instead of having it forever out there.
But for smaller mods? Why not create a subreddit, which is just as free? I mean sure, even better would be a Discourse forum but it's tough to run that fully free if you're just a handful of people. But why Discord in particular? It's not like you regularly engage in voice chat with your users, no?
It works alright in some servers in my experience, but that's because they've set things up intelligently with an FAQ and guides answering less regularly asked questions that are relatively easy...
It works alright in some servers in my experience, but that's because they've set things up intelligently with an FAQ and guides answering less regularly asked questions that are relatively easy to find plus a large enough community that usually you'll get an answer in an hour or two if you do have to ask.
RROx is an example of this in my opinion. And I say that as someone who by-and-large shares your opinion.
Not to mention, not everyone has or wants Facebook. I know there's shit I'm missing out on, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make a Facebook account just to look at a group here and there or use...
Not to mention, not everyone has or wants Facebook. I know there's shit I'm missing out on, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make a Facebook account just to look at a group here and there or use Marketplace.
yeah i still get so disappointed by the terrible results google serves up for pretty much anything. it's always some garbage sponsorship. never a genuine human recommendation. and even reddit was...
yeah i still get so disappointed by the terrible results google serves up for pretty much anything. it's always some garbage sponsorship. never a genuine human recommendation. and even reddit was filled with spammers trying to cheat the system. when reddit admins decided to allow comments on old threads, all they did was give spammers the ability to google product recommendations and then add their marketing spam to any reddit thread that showed up. so then instead of just checking the account's karma and activity, we had to check the date of the post versus the date of the comments and rule out any outliers.
i dont even know how to vet a product or manufacturer without reddit. everything else on google is complete trash and so obviously sponsored. sometimes it feels like everything in life is just an ad!
too real. but on the other hand I was putting more weight on posts from years ago compared to recent ones, since back then it really was just a quiet place to be. it's pretty loud now (been loud)...
i dont even know how to vet a product or manufacturer without reddit.
too real. but on the other hand I was putting more weight on posts from years ago compared to recent ones, since back then it really was just a quiet place to be. it's pretty loud now (been loud) and every kind of scum's got their eyes peeled on how to capitalize on it. can't have shit.
I have been using a paid search engine for about 6 months now. It's really small and doesn't have many users, but I don't think I could go back to Google for any length of time at this point. I...
I have been using a paid search engine for about 6 months now. It's really small and doesn't have many users, but I don't think I could go back to Google for any length of time at this point.
I was super put off by paying for a search engine at first, but I was desperate tbh. I found the other alternatives to be just as bad as Google in different ways. It's nice to search something, and not have Google show me a bunch of stuff it wants me to see...instead of what I searched for.
My breaking point was when I started getting ai written copy/paste articles for almost every tech related search I made. It felt like 90% of the internet just disappeared and I could only access "Download DriverHelp4u" sites.
Isn't it so wild that Google even serves those sites?? Easily more than half of the results for any type of tech troubleshooting question ends up with some unrelated download advertisement. I have...
It felt like 90% of the internet just disappeared and I could only access "Download DriverHelp4u" sites.
Isn't it so wild that Google even serves those sites?? Easily more than half of the results for any type of tech troubleshooting question ends up with some unrelated download advertisement. I have no idea how its possible for Google employees to A) not know about the problem and B) not try to fix it by doing the bare minimum, like blacklisting sites that offer fake troubleshooting advice. But now nearly everything on Google is fake.
Agreed here. I often googled reviews on site:Reddit.com so I could get a (supposedly) real human experience. Even review sites are suspect as they might be paid or given the product for free. I...
Agreed here. I often googled reviews on site:Reddit.com so I could get a (supposedly) real human experience. Even review sites are suspect as they might be paid or given the product for free. I loved the supposed honesty of most Reddit reviews.
Yeah it's like they stopped updating their spam-detection algorithms to account for generated spam-pages. So now say you look for stuff about a specific element of a video game, you'll find...
Yeah it's like they stopped updating their spam-detection algorithms to account for generated spam-pages.
So now say you look for stuff about a specific element of a video game, you'll find hundreds and hundreds of pages that have generated really long "articles" about each and every single quest, item, enemy and whatnot in each game.
With how long and wordy they are and how they constantly cross-reference other "articles" and "pages", they found a way to optimize for Google's ranking, and usually show up first.
That's why adding reddit works so well, because while a lot of Reddit is auto-generated by bots nowadays, too (just look at the anti-blackout-astroturfing on /r/programming right before this week), reddits userbase ensures that the results that Google ranks higher are - usually - the ones that have some actual information in them, otherwise people would be engaging in the post.
it's also I think that Reddit threads on their own don't exactly optimize for SEO (in the way those ai spam articles do), so search terms tend to be naturally more accurate, as they don't tag each...
it's also I think that Reddit threads on their own don't exactly optimize for SEO (in the way those ai spam articles do), so search terms tend to be naturally more accurate, as they don't tag each thread with every irrelevant tag in the dictionary.
I posted earlier about how the full extent of the blackout didn't hit me until I tried Googling something and the subreddits that had the info I wanted were down. Its infuriating how much SEO has...
I posted earlier about how the full extent of the blackout didn't hit me until I tried Googling something and the subreddits that had the info I wanted were down. Its infuriating how much SEO has destroyed search engines.
My Xbox controller wasn’t connecting to my PC earlier today. Yes, I know it’s a first world problem. All of the Reddit threads went to private subreddits, the Microsoft answers site was useless,...
My Xbox controller wasn’t connecting to my PC earlier today. Yes, I know it’s a first world problem. All of the Reddit threads went to private subreddits, the Microsoft answers site was useless, and the other google results were just spam. I never realized before how reliant I am on Reddit for information.
I'm looking to build a new PC and had to postpone those plans just because the relevant subreddits are down. I was stunned with just how bad all of the other options Google was serving me were...
I'm looking to build a new PC and had to postpone those plans just because the relevant subreddits are down. I was stunned with just how bad all of the other options Google was serving me were when trying to find parts information.
Same, finding FFXIV information is ~impossible when /r/FFXIV is private. It's crazy. Huge ripple effects as people effectively have to fly blind for a lot of things.
Same, finding FFXIV information is ~impossible when /r/FFXIV is private. It's crazy. Huge ripple effects as people effectively have to fly blind for a lot of things.
Luckily, I'd argue that the wiki (https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/FF14_Wiki) covers most information you'd need for the game. However, the bits that aren't necessarily on the wiki are now...
Luckily, I'd argue that the wiki (https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/FF14_Wiki) covers most information you'd need for the game. However, the bits that aren't necessarily on the wiki are now impossible to find.
My Google search results have been garbage for a long time. If you don't append "reddit" to your search all you get are websites advertising products. It's especially bad when trying to identify...
My Google search results have been garbage for a long time. If you don't append "reddit" to your search all you get are websites advertising products. It's especially bad when trying to identify good products, for example a search like "best headset in 2023" will give absolutely nothing but junk. This whole reddit shutdown is really revealing how shitty the current internet landscape is.
Lol @ the VPN link. I forget who it was but proton posted about it, a vpn that leeched the bandwidth of its free users and fed it to a botnet of sorts. Even proton can't verify whether they...
Lol @ the VPN link. I forget who it was but proton posted about it, a vpn that leeched the bandwidth of its free users and fed it to a botnet of sorts. Even proton can't verify whether they actually delete logs, otherwise I'd be running a vpn all day. I just use it to bypass stupid region locks, it's very convenient for that.
Also how did the comment section of that info post turn into this lmao.
Seriously. How many of us is actually go beyond the 1st page of Google searches anymore? I don't even bother looking at search hits that don't yield "reddit" because of all the marketing and...
Seriously. How many of us is actually go beyond the 1st page of Google searches anymore? I don't even bother looking at search hits that don't yield "reddit" because of all the marketing and advertising thats injected. I'm so sick of how the internet has shaped the last few decades but I guess this was our own doing.
Relatedly, I tried image reverse searching recently (I'm an actor, and one tip I read to get a better sense of your type was to reverse search your headshot and see what similar pictures showed...
Relatedly, I tried image reverse searching recently (I'm an actor, and one tip I read to get a better sense of your type was to reverse search your headshot and see what similar pictures showed up). It was like all ads for similar clothes to what I was wearing. When I cropped the image in a bit, so it showed less of my clothes, it just updated to 'no similar images'. Which is wild - I remember being able to reverse image search and have photos with similar composition, suggested words to associate with the image, all that. Now it's just shopping.
I tried searching for dehumidifier recommendations during the blackout and it was absolutely hopeless, the front page was ~20 SEO junk articles and 1 Consumer Reports article. Maybe Tildes could...
I tried searching for dehumidifier recommendations during the blackout and it was absolutely hopeless, the front page was ~20 SEO junk articles and 1 Consumer Reports article.
Maybe Tildes could have some kind of regular recommendation thread to start filling in the void? I guess these sorts of discussions / recommendations would fill in over time, but it’d be good to get kickstarted.
here's a recent thread I hope we collectively make something new and wondeful, or at least curate the humans who have this knowledge so that if someone comes to us and ask, hey do you know X, even...
I hope we collectively make something new and wondeful, or at least curate the humans who have this knowledge so that if someone comes to us and ask, hey do you know X, even if we don't know we can say, No, but I know a guy who would know
Google has launched us back into days of the early internet before Google: directories, links, IRC, forums, due to greed
Sidenote: If you are looking for something like this, check whether your country has a publicly funded product testing agency that releases results. For Germany for example there's Stiftung...
I tried searching for dehumidifier recommendations during the blackout and it was absolutely hopeless, the front page was ~20 SEO junk articles and 1 Consumer Reports article.
Sidenote: If you are looking for something like this, check whether your country has a publicly funded product testing agency that releases results. For Germany for example there's Stiftung Warentest. While of course they will not have up-to-date tests for everything at all times, it's one of the best approaches to getting and overview, and also to learn about what specific weaknesses and strengths they're looking for which might often be stuff you've never even considered.
This is why I have mixed feelings about folks deleting all their comment history from Reddit. I understand and fully support anyone's decision to do so, but I can't help but wonder if we'll...
This is why I have mixed feelings about folks deleting all their comment history from Reddit. I understand and fully support anyone's decision to do so, but I can't help but wonder if we'll collectively be hurt more by its loss than Reddit will be.
I fully agree. The loss of all the collective knowledge and information from people overwriting their reddit history has genuinely been causing me more distress than the blackouts as a whole....
I fully agree. The loss of all the collective knowledge and information from people overwriting their reddit history has genuinely been causing me more distress than the blackouts as a whole. There are so many times I’ve searched for solutions to an obscure code bug or a very specific question and the answer has been in a single reddit comment buried on the second page of google, and the thought of that being potentially lost forever makes me want to cry a little.
To most general users, "create your own site" is the moment where they stopped reading your comment and moved on to the next post. Even to most tech-minded users, that's the "ugh, effort"-moment,...
To most general users, "create your own site" is the moment where they stopped reading your comment and moved on to the next post. Even to most tech-minded users, that's the "ugh, effort"-moment, and they're gone.
That's not a solution. That's another problem on top of it.
The purpose behind deleting history is intentionally make the site worse though. The idea is that Reddit admins notice the damage and act to prevent further damage - by allowing 3rd party apps
The purpose behind deleting history is intentionally make the site worse though. The idea is that Reddit admins notice the damage and act to prevent further damage - by allowing 3rd party apps
I understand the intent, and it's a noble one. What I mean is that the damage might end up hurting the community more than it does Reddit. For example: Say an app you use keeps crashing with an...
I understand the intent, and it's a noble one. What I mean is that the damage might end up hurting the community more than it does Reddit.
For example:
Say an app you use keeps crashing with an error message that just says "Error 5001". The error is only encountered by about a dozen people per month. So there's not a lot of good information online, except for a comment on Reddit with instructions on how to fix it. That information is a lot more valuable to you and those 11 other people than what Reddit stands to lose from 12 fewer page views per month if it's deleted.
I encounter variations of this all the time. Here's an example from a few days ago:
OEC data shows that 21.8% of exports from Tokelau, a tiny group of islands in the Pacific, are oscilloscopes. What's going on there? Google only shows one result with a direct explanation: A Reddit comment that explains how to evaluate the data, provides a basic framework for validating questions like it, and provides a likely cause. I got more out of that comment than Reddit did from my having viewed the page.
In any case, if anyone wants to delete their content, it's their right, and I respect that.
This comes down to very similar debates like we see when a CEO or company owner does something shitty and people want to boycott their company. At some point in time, someone shows up and argues...
This comes down to very similar debates like we see when a CEO or company owner does something shitty and people want to boycott their company. At some point in time, someone shows up and argues that people shouldn't boycott the company because that will hurt their employees. Indirectly, that the CEO or owner should be immune to consequence, because other people are potentially caught in the crossfire.
And to be sure, those employees have more to lose and less to pay the losses with. Poor vulnerable people are always hit harder by change than rich successful ones, even when the rich guy was the intended target.
Say an app you use keeps crashing with an error message that just says "Error 5001". The error is only encountered by about a dozen people per month. So there's not a lot of good information online, except for a comment on Reddit with instructions on how to fix it. That information is a lot more valuable to you and those 11 other people than what Reddit stands to lose from 12 fewer page views per month if it's deleted.
So yeah. The one person that month that had that hyper-specific problem is far more directly harmed than Reddit was. But for all that Reddit doesn't meaningfully benefit from that one person's traffic - they do benefit from the aggregate traffic of everyone like them. They benefit to such a degree that adding "reddit" to the end of search parameters is common, as reddit often has the best answer if one exists. Each one of those people contributes to both site prominence in google, and to current cultural understanding that Reddit is a place for real answers. Each one adds value to Reddit's brand identity, and so - each one removed deflates that impression.
My main community over there has seen a flood of join requests while dark, coming in large part from people getting sent our way via google and finding that the post of response they were looking for is behind a privacy wall.
We can rebuild. At the end of the day these are just recommendations for consumer product. What’s the worst that happens? We get the third or fourth best tooth brush on the market or overpay for...
We can rebuild. At the end of the day these are just recommendations for consumer product. What’s the worst that happens? We get the third or fourth best tooth brush on the market or overpay for something by 15%?
We should be willing to burn the old and rebuild somewhere new routinely. Most of this knowledge starts to go stale after a while anyway and Reddit was already starting to head that way. We just need to start discussing things out in the open on indexed platforms instead of Facebook groups and Discord channels again.
I wrote a similar comment a couple of days before yours https://tildes.net/~tech/1625/the_most_liberating_decision_just_deleted_my_reddit_account#comment-8748 But as you can see the comment...
But as you can see the comment supporting deleting reddit history was more widely supported. As @ranvier said "potentially lost forever makes me want to cry a little."
It is a bit like Ray Bradbury having a falling out with his publisher and burning all copies of his books. Sure the publisher has been punished and taught a lesson, but society as a whole is worse for it.
Is this really just a Google problem though? The internet as a whole has become a lot more centralized. I can't remember the article, but I read something a while back that talked about how the...
Is this really just a Google problem though?
The internet as a whole has become a lot more centralized. I can't remember the article, but I read something a while back that talked about how the internet has changed from lots of small (but possibly related) sites to a smaller number of singular sites that cover a large swath of topics.
That change poses problems for any search engine. It doesn't matter if you use Google, or Bing, or DDG, or Brave: if a site containing large amounts of quality content suddenly decides to put that content behind a wall, anything that uses that content will suffer.
Reddit is literally a microcosm of this, as well. Every game used to have a forum on the developer's website, a forum on GameFAQs, and (later) a Steam forum. Now, the Steam forums are vaguely...
The internet as a whole has become a lot more centralized. I can't remember the article, but I read something a while back that talked about how the internet has changed from lots of small (but possibly related) sites to a smaller number of singular sites that cover a large swath of topics.
Reddit is literally a microcosm of this, as well. Every game used to have a forum on the developer's website, a forum on GameFAQs, and (later) a Steam forum. Now, the Steam forums are vaguely unmoderated, dev websites are just for press kits, and GameFAQs is pretty much abandoned. But every single game, TV show, and series has a subreddit.
I've had a GameFAQS account for 23 years, I actually just starting going back over the last few months. I really miss the decentralized web forum approach we lost after Facebook a Reddit took off
I've had a GameFAQS account for 23 years, I actually just starting going back over the last few months.
I really miss the decentralized web forum approach we lost after Facebook a Reddit took off
I'm of the opinion that the fediverse will help in this regard. I get the value of a isolated individual community but also see the value of having all information easily accessible in one place....
I'm of the opinion that the fediverse will help in this regard. I get the value of a isolated individual community but also see the value of having all information easily accessible in one place. One problem with isolated communities is that they all have their individual cultures, making it harder to get started participating. It's expected that you ease into the culture if you want to stay there long term, and that takes effort and encourages lurking. On a centralised website like Reddit there's a "common ground" which everyone even in a new subreddit is familiar and comfortable with. The fediverse allows the creation of individual communities, each on their own website, but also retains the connection and "common ground" between each individual community, making it easier to ease into other communities. So I think it might help.
Mastodon is so close to good. I tried it and left after not much time because it's unsearchable. It feels like Twitter (which I also do not use), just worse somehow. I am not on these kinds of...
Mastodon is so close to good. I tried it and left after not much time because it's unsearchable. It feels like Twitter (which I also do not use), just worse somehow.
I am not on these kinds of sites often enough to sift through the firehose and hope I see something interesting.
Not at all, and my regular attempts to use DDG as a replacement for Google if anything showcase that Google is still - marginally - better at fending off the AI-generated spam sites. Not by a...
Is this really just a Google problem though?
Not at all, and my regular attempts to use DDG as a replacement for Google if anything showcase that Google is still - marginally - better at fending off the AI-generated spam sites. Not by a whole lot, but wow are Bing and DDG a cesspool of unusable results.
I've accidentally un-blackouted just by absent-mindedly clicking on the top links on Google once or twice now. I'd like to point out that both times it led to a privated subreddit with an...
I've accidentally un-blackouted just by absent-mindedly clicking on the top links on Google once or twice now. I'd like to point out that both times it led to a privated subreddit with an explanation of the protest, so it was great to see it's a message that definitely reaching outside of reddit itself.
I've since installed an extension called uBlacklist to avoid making that mistake again, at least for the next week or so.
I like using uBlacklist just for filtering out garbage Quora results. I swear I have NEVER found a single correct answer on Quora. Nobody has any clue what they are talking about when they reply...
I like using uBlacklist just for filtering out garbage Quora results. I swear I have NEVER found a single correct answer on Quora. Nobody has any clue what they are talking about when they reply to a question.
Quora is one of the worst offenders for this kind of search result trashening, along with Pinterest for images. I think the part about Quora that really gets me is that it's just as wildly...
Quora is one of the worst offenders for this kind of search result trashening, along with Pinterest for images. I think the part about Quora that really gets me is that it's just as wildly incorrect as answers on Yahoo! Answers were, but they're not even bad in a funny way. It's just an incredibly long-winded way of showing you the Dunning-Kruger graph image.
My main issue with blacklist-type extensions for Google (when I still used Google) though was how much it screwed with pagination. After I blocked everything that I hated seeing, there would be like one or two results on the first page.
Kagi, it's a paid search engine with a few nice QoL features like being able to filter out "listicle" type results as well as blacklist / downrank / promote domains of your choice. I try not to...
Kagi, it's a paid search engine with a few nice QoL features like being able to filter out "listicle" type results as well as blacklist / downrank / promote domains of your choice. I try not to mention it straight away when I'm posting about search as I really don't want to come off as a shill. It's definitely still not perfect by any means (I think the general quality of the internet has decreased so there's not really much you can do about that) but at least I don't have to see a page entirely full of results I won't click anyway.
No, I had no interest in DDG after finding out about the whole Microsoft thing with them. If I wanted a search engine that had deals with big tech I'd just stick with Google.
No, I had no interest in DDG after finding out about the whole Microsoft thing with them. If I wanted a search engine that had deals with big tech I'd just stick with Google.
This seems like it may be a relevant point to at least one reason why Google have been pushing to not just provide links to the information you're looking for, but the information itself - You've...
This seems like it may be a relevant point to at least one reason why Google have been pushing to not just provide links to the information you're looking for, but the information itself - You've probably noticed how many searches deliver more and more Google provided content including the 'People also ask' and 'Things to know' drop downs, the 'Featured Snippets', and sometimes even a big sidebar with information scrapped from all over.
Don't have to rely on the proclivities of other parties if you scrap up all the data and deliver it yourself. Particularly with the integration of AI into search, it wouldn't surprise me if eventually the old model of search engines designed to best get you to where you're going eventually shift into something far more siloed.
At Google I/O this year, they previewed a big expansion of their direct answer responses. But it creates a perverse incentive: When you short-circuit a site's organic traffic, the websites you're...
But it creates a perverse incentive: When you short-circuit a site's organic traffic, the websites you're scraping build their walls higher. Reportedly, OpenAI's use of Reddit data in its training corpus was the thing that kicked off the current mess.
However, the genie is out of the bottle. Even if the FTC came down hard on Google for this, there's little incentive for sites to tear their walls down. So it's hard to see a path back.
Another thing that may happen alongside higher walls is that many sites from which Google et. al. scrap their data from may just fade away as traffic is siphoned away. Which, if it occurred, would...
Another thing that may happen alongside higher walls is that many sites from which Google et. al. scrap their data from may just fade away as traffic is siphoned away. Which, if it occurred, would also hurt those who rely on those same sites for their content. Particularly those megalithic entities which require constant growth to justify their existence, it may end up being a tragic flaw leading themselves fading as well.
(of course, predicting the future is notoriously difficult so who knows what will end up happening on this wonderful, horrible, strange collection of tubes)
Yeah does anyone serious (and savvy) about searching for something these days do regular searches anymore? I always search with Reddit. Like when I want to know how a product is I go to Reddit...
Yeah does anyone serious (and savvy) about searching for something these days do regular searches anymore? I always search with Reddit.
Like when I want to know how a product is I go to Reddit every time vs other review methods.
I tried explaining this to someone like a week ago, I knew my job would get increasingly more difficult without my Google search with "reddit" at the end. They had no clue. Haha.
I tried explaining this to someone like a week ago, I knew my job would get increasingly more difficult without my Google search with "reddit" at the end. They had no clue. Haha.
I already used reddit for most of my questions because as the article states, it is (usually) actual humans giving me their feedback or answers. This solidifies how to me how much of a valuable...
I already used reddit for most of my questions because as the article states, it is (usually) actual humans giving me their feedback or answers. This solidifies how to me how much of a valuable tool it is. Too bad about management.
I've actually moved into asking ChatGPT for some of the troubleshooting answers now. It's not entirely right... (but then again neither are all forum posts for that matter) and it kind of gives me...
I've actually moved into asking ChatGPT for some of the troubleshooting answers now. It's not entirely right... (but then again neither are all forum posts for that matter) and it kind of gives me a way forward. I've asked it to go back and search its data for what reddit users have recommended for certain questions and it's actually a decent stop gap at the moment.
I turned on the "Search Generative Experience" lab in Google, which gives me results that rank a few notches below Reddit results, but several notches above the SEO AI-written garbage that...
I turned on the "Search Generative Experience" lab in Google, which gives me results that rank a few notches below Reddit results, but several notches above the SEO AI-written garbage that dominates the first 20 results.
I didn't realize how many people used Google to find information and used reddit as the source. I think I've googled a few things and clicked on reddit sources for video game things but not more...
I didn't realize how many people used Google to find information and used reddit as the source. I think I've googled a few things and clicked on reddit sources for video game things but not more than a handful of times.
If it's product or service related I am going to Reddit results first. The key is real discussion between real people, not paid for reviews or other spam/junk. And on Reddit it's fairly easy to...
If it's product or service related I am going to Reddit results first. The key is real discussion between real people, not paid for reviews or other spam/junk. And on Reddit it's fairly easy to quickly check a person's comment history so it's much easier to spot shills.
I'm sorry I'm very late to the party but this blackout made me very invested in ChatGPT. I ask the extremely obscure tech issues to it instead of doing a search. Also, apparently forums still...
I'm sorry I'm very late to the party but this blackout made me very invested in ChatGPT. I ask the extremely obscure tech issues to it instead of doing a search.
Also, apparently forums still exist. But they're a shell of their former selves.
We really, really need some place to ask around niche tech questions; not serious sites like SO/SE tho.
After getting fed up with Google (and being a fan of startups), I've been using Kagi for the past year. Sorry if it sounds shilling, but check it out if you want. You can use DDG bangs, custom...
After getting fed up with Google (and being a fan of startups), I've been using Kagi for the past year. Sorry if it sounds shilling, but check it out if you want. You can use DDG bangs, custom ones, or even Google if necessary. Overall, a lot more organic results.
More so on topic, Google still seems to have the "most" of the internet indexed, but they push so much junk on the front page that's either written by AI, paid for, or both.
I just signed up for the one-time trial. I think I like it so far, but I find myself very aware that each search is metered against my quota so I hesitate before submitting each search. Which plan...
I just signed up for the one-time trial. I think I like it so far, but I find myself very aware that each search is metered against my quota so I hesitate before submitting each search.
Which plan did you sign up for? I’ve got no idea how many searches I do each month but I feel like it must be hundreds.
I'm grandfathered in at the "Early Supporter Plan" or whatever they call it @ $10/m or $120/year, which allows unlimited searches (for now...they were going to limit it to 1500? I think). If...
I'm grandfathered in at the "Early Supporter Plan" or whatever they call it @ $10/m or $120/year, which allows unlimited searches (for now...they were going to limit it to 1500? I think). If anything, it made me better at searching using different bangs and terms than I was before. The discord has a lot of custom queries people have made.
If I were to go into it now, I'd probably be on the unlimited plan since my monthly total usually exceeds the metered offerings. Also, it's cut down on my "lazy searching," eg, typing in "CNN local news" vs. typing in "Cnn.com" and clicking on the local news tab.
Just goes to show how bad Google has been for a while. If one site going down (in this case, only partially) kills that much of your search engine's usability, then you've got a search engine to fix.
On the contrary, I think it speaks to how necessary and sought-after guaranteed actual-human information is. Reddit's communities did the leg work of having genuine, non-advert-based information that could be easily parsed through to find what was needed. There was inherent trust in it, or at least the people that posted there.
Where else can you go to find reviews of products that you know for a fact aren't either outright fake or paid-for? Even if you're like "huh, this guy sounds like a shill" you can then quickly check the poster's history and see if it's a real account-- an actual person.
A nonzero chunk of the issue is still in Google's court, in that reddit was often the only source they were surfacing that had the human element. There's more to the web than SEO-riddled blog spam, but since we're all stuck to the habit of using Google, what opportunity is there to find them?
It's because reddit is the biggest (and pretty much only) game left in town. What else is out there that google should be signal boosting?
Chicken and Egg, though.
Good niche sites died because the Google algo allowed hyper-SEO'd trash sites to supersede them in the rankings, so now there's nearly no good authentic sites centered around niche topics other than Reddit - which had the benefit of a self-sustaining community & content stream regardless of access to google traffic.
This has the right of it, in my opinion. I used to run tiny independent guide websites for whatever games I was into at the time, and it became harder and harder for me to compete. Eventually it got to the point where I just posted them directly to Reddit, because they'd actually get used, there.
I can't speak to everyone's experience, but the tactics for rigging SEO absolutely crushed my ability to get seen, even if I googled my specific website's name. I admit SEO has always been a weak spot of mine, but what I did used to be enough, once upon a time. Not anymore, not for years.
Yep, I remember reading stories in the past from people who made money creating niche sites and running ads on them. It wasn't crazy money, but it was enough to make it worth it, and it provided good, human-generated content for the web.
I worked on a small site way back then. Didn't made a lot, but site kept itself afloat with literally 0 SEO as we had no idea what we were doing.
As an example, I'm replaying FFT and I wanted to read some long form analysis of the character of Delita. About two pages of Reddit and GameFAQs results, two articles, and just gibbering nonsense by the third page. I know for a fact there's a corpus of information out there, and I'm sure if I tinker with the search I can make it better. But damn, Google has become absolutely useless.
My workplace company has started to put out ads on Bing for the first time, and according to our SEO guy Bing traffic is growing.
Bing used to be a laughing stock used by my grandma or people who didn't know how to change the default. But now I kind of get it. I am tempted to switch to Bing. I have to wonder if a site without that much monolith power and influence, with different algorithms, will give me different content I wouldn't find otherwise. And less ads, maybe.
Bing has integrated their chat with search well, especially if you use their app or Microsoft Edge. I actually started using Edge just to use the chat since it uses GPT-4, which is the only place I can use it for free if you don't want to spent money buying credits on OpenAI. I used ChatGPT for a while but I barely even open it after I started using Bing Chat. It's what I'm assuming Google wants to do with Bard and their future vision of chat-based search, but Bing is already there.
I was skeptical about chat-based search being the new way people search, but I was imagining it being similar to the response you get from Google Assistant, which has been slower and less useful than doing a search yourself. But with looking something up with GPT-4 chat means that it does the browsing for you. It processes the results and gives you the condensed version, which is what you're generally looking for, without having to read filler content or keyword-stuffed SEO bullshit. It also links to the references, so if it's a topic important enough that you would want to fact-check it, you can go through the source yourself. And it does this with multiple sources.
I'm not sure if the chat traffic is counted towards overall Bing traffic, but I see websites that will have to modify their content to be the sources that's picked up by the algorithms of the chat search, instead of writing something that would be directly read by people. I haven't seen much discussion around this, any SEO-GPT discussions are geared towards using GPT to increase SEO rankings, which sure, might be effective now, but I don't think it's sustainable because SEO-focused content has already degraded the quality of search results and I think the future might actually be people not reading any of it directly at all but rather through ChatGPT-style chatbots. I don't know if it's great for developing reading comprehension, which I feel is on a downward trend in general, but it is where I see the future of search going.
I've been using Bing and DuckDuckGo for a month and am happy with it. I don't search much because I already have a bunch of sites I need bookmarked, but it is serving me well.
I just stopped using Google search one day and I don't miss it.
Sadly maps and drive/docs are irreplaceable.
i almost exclusively use osm for maps, because the maps tend to be better, even if 98% of info is super accurate on both, it's the last 2% that generally does it for me. part of that might be my habits though; i've seen the rankings, suggested things, and whatever gamed so much on google maps (e.g. "highest rated restaurants in the area") that i just inherently don't trust them any more. so i only really use maps for looking up addresses, or routing information. and another reason i might not be standard for routing info: 9/10 times i'm looking for vague directions so i can get to my end destination in a meandering way instead of the quickest (and often most boring) way possible. i like taking the detour, unless i need to be somewhere quick, in which case my local knowledge is good enough to get me there without maps.
drive/docs, in my experience, is a network effect thing. i've been using a personal nextcloud instance for a while, and it mostly works really nice. no collaborative writing though, so can't touch on that
I tried OSM for maps; its actually the only point I haven't been able to divorce Google (I use a hybrid of Maps and Waze on GrapheneOS). It's complete trash for monitoring traffic conditions, and since I commute about 120 mi (~190 km) a day, I'm not about to sit still when I could have known what was really ahead.
I used osmand for quite some time and for navigation is good enough. The good thing on Google Maps is the ratings and to know if something is open or not. I get a lot of wrong info because people don't update, but at least there is some info.
Ive been using ddg for years, I havnt a need for anything else, at the least I can say it has the type of stuff I'm searching for
I gave Bing a fair shot a couple of months ago. The regular search results are ok but multi-keyword searches require specific syntax. That in itself is not a deal breaker but presents a significant barrier of entry to many people. The real issue is how often you rely on search results to be enriched with Google Maps which is so far ahead of everybody it's not even funny. Having to go back all the time was what broke me ultimately.
I have found Bing to be more useful if I am resorting to using a search engine. It seems to listen much closer than Google, I'm really not sure what has happened at Google but they appear to ignore a lot of what you specify even if you know how to use a search engine and its various operators.
Bing is by no means perfect but it does seem more useful. I often have to track down car parts based on model numbers, use image search to narrow down parts that change slightly during facelift years etc and Google is basically hopeless for it, Bing is the only place I stand a chance of success. Google seems to think it's a shopping site or something.
Remember "if it's not on the first two pages of google it doesn't exist"?
Now a search result for a small string will sometimes just say "nope, doesn't exist" or I'll get a page of "Untitled" (wtf even are those??) then I ADD a word to the search and suddenly it brings some results up. Adding a word is generally supposed to help narrow a search down so wtf.
Exactly. If Google would rank down sites that are overly wordy on domains that contain "too much content overall", they'd instantly throw out virtually all generated spam, and hence also indirectly boost smaller blogs and all.
I kind of feel like if it was that simple it'd be done already - if there's an algorithm, there's a way to optimize your site for it.
Currently the alg rewards verbose sites with heavy keywording, so that's currently the style showing up at the top. Back when the alg rewarded interlinking, you'd get blogrings and a million and one interlinks seeded into the text, before that it was tags and keyword spam blocks in the article footer. If they changed the rules to punish excessive wordy sites, then the SEO'd sites would learn how much text is too much, how much is not enough, and hover exactly within the golden range.
I think part of the problem is that they're not rotating rules rapidly enough, and trying to stabilize sites across rules changes. Like, assuming here, I think that a site too-heavily optimized for a specific google pagerank algorithm would absolutely plummet in rankings if assessed by a different metric, where a "normal" site would probably hold a much more static ranking position.
The other thing I think holds 'normal' sites down is that once a site is absolutely great, people stop using google to reach it - they use the site and go directly. If it weren't a privacy nightmare and engines were able to see how much direct traffic occurred, that should be a strong factor in page rank. I'm not going to return multiple times to a site that's SEO'd bullshit, but if it's a good resource to something I need, I'll be back several times and just go directly after the first one or two.
Totally offtopic, but I assume your username is a Malazan reference? If so, I hope you and @WhiskeyJack don't get into a fight. ;)
It is! It was my reddit handle as well, I snagged it in like ... first year Uni. I was glad to grab it here as well.
Whenever someone says anything I always feel like I need explain myself~! - I picked it after like book two in MBotF, after the character had like thirty pages of appearance, while the series was still niche and nearly unheard of. My motivation was that he wasn't a total dickbag and his name sounded dope when said out loud. I was almost "Kallor" except that dude is a knob.
In hindsight to the full series now, "Anomander" feels about as original as if I picked "Superman" for my username.
Hah. True. But if I had based my username on Malazan I probably would have gone with one of my favorite characters, either Kruppe or Tehol Beddict, who are rather OP themselves right from the get-go... so I have no room to criticize your choice of going with Anomander. :P
Google used to show you all kinds of niche technical forums with answers.
Those still exist somewhat, google is just hiding them to prefer spam AI article websites and reddit.
So of course reddit is the better choice.
I've lost count of the number of times that I've searched for the solution to a problem, and found a Stack Overflow page with a similar problem that has not quite the right solution, and then 25 random websites with names like "techsupport 247" that have just copied the top answer from that SO page into something vaguely resembling a blog post. I hate the modern web.
Most of the time,you even have to add "reddit" to a query for some search engine magic. Of course you can't do that if you don't know the name of the niche forum you really need right now.
I suppose what google - or a competitor who wants to eat their lunch - needs to do is add an option to classify website types. Adding the "wiki" keyword works well, because that keyword appears all over the relevant sites. But I can't put a filter like "blog" or "forum" or "community" or "journalism" or "OEM" on it without inviting meta-results about these sources rather than from them.
The ML technology to make it happen exists. Just chuck a parse of the website into a transformer and it can easily tell you what's going on.
Google used to have this feature and they removed it. You could filter by the "Discussion" category. I used it all the time and I'm still pissed they removed it.
For finding niche content, try Marginalia. I don't know how well it works for technical stuff, but it's been great for finding smaller websites I wouldn't find on any of the major search engines. I hate being restricted to just a couple of websites when there are so many good ones out there that also produce good, if not sometimes better content.
Thanks, that looks pretty useful.
Not actively I think. I suspect rather they laid off the people who were continously playing a highly specific cat&mouse game, and this in turn opened up their algorithm to be black-box tested until the spammers found out just how to generate their spam-pages to boost them all the way to the top.
I grew up using forums and there will be niche technical answers of my own littered about the web. But these days with google when linked to forums I often find my self greeted with "this problem has already been answered multiple times on this forum, use the search function". When I try to use the search function I'm told I need to register an account first.
When I try to use google to limit searches for that domain I get nonsense or links to threads that were deleted etc. I think some of those forums were quite restrictive with robots.txt and other mechanisms such that only unregistered user areas were indexed.
The forum posts can also be very outdated, and while that forum might have a more up to date response, again I can't use their search function.
Forums are also a pain compared with threaded discussions in mailing lists, usenet, slashdot and reddit. You might need to wade through 20 pages of nonsense before finding a real answer.
To me it's like Google is the automated answering service, and a place like Reddit is an actual person on the line you can speak to. Of course I'm going to prefer speaking to an actual person to get what I need.
Hopefully Tildes can become a place like that one day, where almost all my searches for products/services include a "tildes" on the end.
Google has been suppressing web forum results for nearly a decade now and significantly contributes to their lack of use.
This is it, if you don't append 'reddit' to your searches you'll get pages of useless Quora results, pinterest results etc.
Even a lot of the official tech support forums are hopeless, I'm specifically thinking of Microsoft's where you seem to stand a very slim chance of finding the solution on page 18 after a zillion replies telling people to run sfc /scannow.
The web is pretty broken due to having so few places to actually discuss things these days and the search tools we do have are pretty much broken due to decades of 'optimization'.
None, because if anything Bing - and by extension DDG - showcase that you can always do worse than Google, at least for all my gaming/programming/pet/cooking related questions. 😂
I recently moved all of my searching to a local instance of SearXNG, which collates results from dozens of search engines and feeds false data to each, to anonymize them. I'm actually pretty happy with the results for web, but news and images is far from perfect.
There seems to be a lot less. People resorted to appending 'reddit' to the end of their searches due to reddit replacing most of the places that previously had useful information. A lot of the forums etc where you would find the same thing pre-reddit are gone.
Of course in the pre-reddit days Google seemed a lot more efficient at finding these forums, nowadays you add reddit not just because it replaced so many forums but because the rest of the results Google indexes are basically useless. Think Quora etc.
The web is a mess and we did it to ourselves more or less, we can try to blame Google etc and it does share some blame but we didn't value what we had and this is the result, page after page of useless spam.
Agreed. It pains me greatly that a lot of quality human discussion are going to places like Discord that aren't indexed or searchable.
Every major game overhaul/mod moving to Discord is one of the worst things to happen in the history of humanity.
I'm being a little hyperbolic, but holy shit it's awful. I'm playing a WIP Elden Ring mod, I'm curious on how to get a spell since it's not in the right place, I have to go to the Discord, react to a message, agree to TOS, figure out which channel to search, and then if I'm lucky someone has (vaguely recently) asked about it. If not, I have to ask and hope that someone responds soon.
Discord isn't a forum replacement and was never meant to be, but some-fucking-how that's the way everything is going. I love Discord as the Skype+IRC replacement we desperately needed, but it never should have become this community-focused grab bag of bullshit. Every server has it's own rules and way that things are handled, there's no consistency between what bots/commands are used in any of them, nothing is indexed anywhere, and I still hate avatars and wish they would go away.
I would love to talk to someone who started a public Discord community for a specific niche interest pre-pandemic, when it wasn't nearly as popular. I imagine it started as a cleaner IRC replacement, which made onboarding new users easier, but as Discord grew it just... eugh.
Shit sucks. Discord's ubiquity really gets me heated.
I was having a struggle the other night trying to find information about a particular niche. I search and start reading back through the logs because I think I'm close to finding it, but it's taking forever as I'm having to scroll through so much off-topic chat and memes. I then run into some unfamiliar terms that are also particular to this niche and might be relevant. Do I search to find out what those mean and lose my place here? Do I copy/paste a chunk of the chat to help find my way back, or do I pull out my phone so I can have a second instance of Discord just to do the search?
I'm with you, seeing how much information gets buried in Discord upsets me.
I really hate Discord as well and it's troubling to see it used as a forum or at least for similar functions to a forum.
Non-indexed, usually gated, requires a specific application to access, requires an account to access, requires an invite (in most cases) to access...
If it does have what you are looking for then good luck finding it (and which channel it is in) between all the usual user chat, memes, links etc...
As if the web wasn't bad enough. Then, as if you needed, it the final kick in the teeth from this hateful service is that you jump through all the hoops and find that the Discord application won't even save your settings if you use it's "Log out" feature so enjoy all that beeping and bopping, flashing notifications etc if you ever log in again.
These are the features I would want from a chat. Using Discord as a forum is definitely a problem.
I have to ask, why does it actually happen for smaller stuff?
I get it for large companies. The lack of legacy can be preferrable to large companies in regards to having full control of their published information even into the future, being able to re-publish as required instead of having it forever out there.
But for smaller mods? Why not create a subreddit, which is just as free? I mean sure, even better would be a Discourse forum but it's tough to run that fully free if you're just a handful of people. But why Discord in particular? It's not like you regularly engage in voice chat with your users, no?
It works alright in some servers in my experience, but that's because they've set things up intelligently with an FAQ and guides answering less regularly asked questions that are relatively easy to find plus a large enough community that usually you'll get an answer in an hour or two if you do have to ask.
RROx is an example of this in my opinion. And I say that as someone who by-and-large shares your opinion.
Amen XD
As another example, lots of niche car forums (as well as many other topics) moved to Facebook Groups. None of that is getting indexed. It's a shame.
Not to mention, not everyone has or wants Facebook. I know there's shit I'm missing out on, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make a Facebook account just to look at a group here and there or use Marketplace.
yeah i still get so disappointed by the terrible results google serves up for pretty much anything. it's always some garbage sponsorship. never a genuine human recommendation. and even reddit was filled with spammers trying to cheat the system. when reddit admins decided to allow comments on old threads, all they did was give spammers the ability to google product recommendations and then add their marketing spam to any reddit thread that showed up. so then instead of just checking the account's karma and activity, we had to check the date of the post versus the date of the comments and rule out any outliers.
i dont even know how to vet a product or manufacturer without reddit. everything else on google is complete trash and so obviously sponsored. sometimes it feels like everything in life is just an ad!
too real. but on the other hand I was putting more weight on posts from years ago compared to recent ones, since back then it really was just a quiet place to be. it's pretty loud now (been loud) and every kind of scum's got their eyes peeled on how to capitalize on it. can't have shit.
I have been using a paid search engine for about 6 months now. It's really small and doesn't have many users, but I don't think I could go back to Google for any length of time at this point.
I was super put off by paying for a search engine at first, but I was desperate tbh. I found the other alternatives to be just as bad as Google in different ways. It's nice to search something, and not have Google show me a bunch of stuff it wants me to see...instead of what I searched for.
My breaking point was when I started getting ai written copy/paste articles for almost every tech related search I made. It felt like 90% of the internet just disappeared and I could only access "Download DriverHelp4u" sites.
Isn't it so wild that Google even serves those sites?? Easily more than half of the results for any type of tech troubleshooting question ends up with some unrelated download advertisement. I have no idea how its possible for Google employees to A) not know about the problem and B) not try to fix it by doing the bare minimum, like blacklisting sites that offer fake troubleshooting advice. But now nearly everything on Google is fake.
Agreed here. I often googled reviews on site:Reddit.com so I could get a (supposedly) real human experience. Even review sites are suspect as they might be paid or given the product for free. I loved the supposed honesty of most Reddit reviews.
Yeah it's like they stopped updating their spam-detection algorithms to account for generated spam-pages.
So now say you look for stuff about a specific element of a video game, you'll find hundreds and hundreds of pages that have generated really long "articles" about each and every single quest, item, enemy and whatnot in each game.
With how long and wordy they are and how they constantly cross-reference other "articles" and "pages", they found a way to optimize for Google's ranking, and usually show up first.
That's why adding
redditworks so well, because while a lot of Reddit is auto-generated by bots nowadays, too (just look at the anti-blackout-astroturfing on /r/programming right before this week), reddits userbase ensures that the results that Google ranks higher are - usually - the ones that have some actual information in them, otherwise people would be engaging in the post.it's also I think that Reddit threads on their own don't exactly optimize for SEO (in the way those ai spam articles do), so search terms tend to be naturally more accurate, as they don't tag each thread with every irrelevant tag in the dictionary.
I had half of my searches during work fall apart because search + reddit got me a this isn't available message
I posted earlier about how the full extent of the blackout didn't hit me until I tried Googling something and the subreddits that had the info I wanted were down. Its infuriating how much SEO has destroyed search engines.
My Xbox controller wasn’t connecting to my PC earlier today. Yes, I know it’s a first world problem. All of the Reddit threads went to private subreddits, the Microsoft answers site was useless, and the other google results were just spam. I never realized before how reliant I am on Reddit for information.
I'm looking to build a new PC and had to postpone those plans just because the relevant subreddits are down. I was stunned with just how bad all of the other options Google was serving me were when trying to find parts information.
On desktop you can often view cached versions of results in Google. If the Reddit post is old, you will likely see everything there.
Same, finding FFXIV information is ~impossible when /r/FFXIV is private. It's crazy. Huge ripple effects as people effectively have to fly blind for a lot of things.
Luckily, I'd argue that the wiki (https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/FF14_Wiki) covers most information you'd need for the game. However, the bits that aren't necessarily on the wiki are now impossible to find.
Haha, that was also the first time I said "fuck spez" out loud
My Google search results have been garbage for a long time. If you don't append "reddit" to your search all you get are websites advertising products. It's especially bad when trying to identify good products, for example a search like "best headset in 2023" will give absolutely nothing but junk. This whole reddit shutdown is really revealing how shitty the current internet landscape is.
Yes I've noticed all the lists are just scraped Amazon results. It's really crummy
Lol @ the VPN link. I forget who it was but proton posted about it, a vpn that leeched the bandwidth of its free users and fed it to a botnet of sorts. Even proton can't verify whether they actually delete logs, otherwise I'd be running a vpn all day. I just use it to bypass stupid region locks, it's very convenient for that.
Also how did the comment section of that info post turn into this lmao.
Seriously. How many of us is actually go beyond the 1st page of Google searches anymore? I don't even bother looking at search hits that don't yield "reddit" because of all the marketing and advertising thats injected. I'm so sick of how the internet has shaped the last few decades but I guess this was our own doing.
It's capitalism's doing. Every quarter must bring increasing profits. Everything that starts good destroys itself
If it's any indicator, Google got rid of pages last year, it's just an endless scroll now.
Relatedly, I tried image reverse searching recently (I'm an actor, and one tip I read to get a better sense of your type was to reverse search your headshot and see what similar pictures showed up). It was like all ads for similar clothes to what I was wearing. When I cropped the image in a bit, so it showed less of my clothes, it just updated to 'no similar images'. Which is wild - I remember being able to reverse image search and have photos with similar composition, suggested words to associate with the image, all that. Now it's just shopping.
I recommend tineye, it's its own reverse image search that Ive always found works better than googles.
I know you were just giving an example but I really like and trust https://www.rtings.com/ for that kind of stuff.
I tried searching for dehumidifier recommendations during the blackout and it was absolutely hopeless, the front page was ~20 SEO junk articles and 1 Consumer Reports article.
Maybe Tildes could have some kind of regular recommendation thread to start filling in the void? I guess these sorts of discussions / recommendations would fill in over time, but it’d be good to get kickstarted.
here's a recent thread
I hope we collectively make something new and wondeful, or at least curate the humans who have this knowledge so that if someone comes to us and ask, hey do you know X, even if we don't know we can say, No, but I know a guy who would know
Google has launched us back into days of the early internet before Google: directories, links, IRC, forums, due to greed
Sidenote: If you are looking for something like this, check whether your country has a publicly funded product testing agency that releases results. For Germany for example there's Stiftung Warentest. While of course they will not have up-to-date tests for everything at all times, it's one of the best approaches to getting and overview, and also to learn about what specific weaknesses and strengths they're looking for which might often be stuff you've never even considered.
This is why I have mixed feelings about folks deleting all their comment history from Reddit. I understand and fully support anyone's decision to do so, but I can't help but wonder if we'll collectively be hurt more by its loss than Reddit will be.
I fully agree. The loss of all the collective knowledge and information from people overwriting their reddit history has genuinely been causing me more distress than the blackouts as a whole. There are so many times I’ve searched for solutions to an obscure code bug or a very specific question and the answer has been in a single reddit comment buried on the second page of google, and the thought of that being potentially lost forever makes me want to cry a little.
The issue is making those sites visible. If it's all on a self-hosted site, chances are it won't ever show up on Google or other search engines.
To most general users, "create your own site" is the moment where they stopped reading your comment and moved on to the next post. Even to most tech-minded users, that's the "ugh, effort"-moment, and they're gone.
That's not a solution. That's another problem on top of it.
The purpose behind deleting history is intentionally make the site worse though. The idea is that Reddit admins notice the damage and act to prevent further damage - by allowing 3rd party apps
I understand the intent, and it's a noble one. What I mean is that the damage might end up hurting the community more than it does Reddit.
For example:
Say an app you use keeps crashing with an error message that just says "Error 5001". The error is only encountered by about a dozen people per month. So there's not a lot of good information online, except for a comment on Reddit with instructions on how to fix it. That information is a lot more valuable to you and those 11 other people than what Reddit stands to lose from 12 fewer page views per month if it's deleted.
I encounter variations of this all the time. Here's an example from a few days ago:
OEC data shows that 21.8% of exports from Tokelau, a tiny group of islands in the Pacific, are oscilloscopes. What's going on there? Google only shows one result with a direct explanation: A Reddit comment that explains how to evaluate the data, provides a basic framework for validating questions like it, and provides a likely cause. I got more out of that comment than Reddit did from my having viewed the page.
In any case, if anyone wants to delete their content, it's their right, and I respect that.
This comes down to very similar debates like we see when a CEO or company owner does something shitty and people want to boycott their company. At some point in time, someone shows up and argues that people shouldn't boycott the company because that will hurt their employees. Indirectly, that the CEO or owner should be immune to consequence, because other people are potentially caught in the crossfire.
And to be sure, those employees have more to lose and less to pay the losses with. Poor vulnerable people are always hit harder by change than rich successful ones, even when the rich guy was the intended target.
So yeah. The one person that month that had that hyper-specific problem is far more directly harmed than Reddit was. But for all that Reddit doesn't meaningfully benefit from that one person's traffic - they do benefit from the aggregate traffic of everyone like them. They benefit to such a degree that adding "reddit" to the end of search parameters is common, as reddit often has the best answer if one exists. Each one of those people contributes to both site prominence in google, and to current cultural understanding that Reddit is a place for real answers. Each one adds value to Reddit's brand identity, and so - each one removed deflates that impression.
My main community over there has seen a flood of join requests while dark, coming in large part from people getting sent our way via google and finding that the post of response they were looking for is behind a privacy wall.
We can rebuild. At the end of the day these are just recommendations for consumer product. What’s the worst that happens? We get the third or fourth best tooth brush on the market or overpay for something by 15%?
We should be willing to burn the old and rebuild somewhere new routinely. Most of this knowledge starts to go stale after a while anyway and Reddit was already starting to head that way. We just need to start discussing things out in the open on indexed platforms instead of Facebook groups and Discord channels again.
I wrote a similar comment a couple of days before yours https://tildes.net/~tech/1625/the_most_liberating_decision_just_deleted_my_reddit_account#comment-8748
But as you can see the comment supporting deleting reddit history was more widely supported. As @ranvier said "potentially lost forever makes me want to cry a little."
It is a bit like Ray Bradbury having a falling out with his publisher and burning all copies of his books. Sure the publisher has been punished and taught a lesson, but society as a whole is worse for it.
Is this really just a Google problem though?
The internet as a whole has become a lot more centralized. I can't remember the article, but I read something a while back that talked about how the internet has changed from lots of small (but possibly related) sites to a smaller number of singular sites that cover a large swath of topics.
That change poses problems for any search engine. It doesn't matter if you use Google, or Bing, or DDG, or Brave: if a site containing large amounts of quality content suddenly decides to put that content behind a wall, anything that uses that content will suffer.
Reddit is literally a microcosm of this, as well. Every game used to have a forum on the developer's website, a forum on GameFAQs, and (later) a Steam forum. Now, the Steam forums are vaguely unmoderated, dev websites are just for press kits, and GameFAQs is pretty much abandoned. But every single game, TV show, and series has a subreddit.
I've had a GameFAQS account for 23 years, I actually just starting going back over the last few months.
I really miss the decentralized web forum approach we lost after Facebook a Reddit took off
I'm of the opinion that the fediverse will help in this regard. I get the value of a isolated individual community but also see the value of having all information easily accessible in one place. One problem with isolated communities is that they all have their individual cultures, making it harder to get started participating. It's expected that you ease into the culture if you want to stay there long term, and that takes effort and encourages lurking. On a centralised website like Reddit there's a "common ground" which everyone even in a new subreddit is familiar and comfortable with. The fediverse allows the creation of individual communities, each on their own website, but also retains the connection and "common ground" between each individual community, making it easier to ease into other communities. So I think it might help.
Mastodon is so close to good. I tried it and left after not much time because it's unsearchable. It feels like Twitter (which I also do not use), just worse somehow.
I am not on these kinds of sites often enough to sift through the firehose and hope I see something interesting.
I can think about almost any topic and there'll be a group chatting away about it
It's time to bring back blog rings. :P
Not at all, and my regular attempts to use DDG as a replacement for Google if anything showcase that Google is still - marginally - better at fending off the AI-generated spam sites. Not by a whole lot, but wow are Bing and DDG a cesspool of unusable results.
I've accidentally un-blackouted just by absent-mindedly clicking on the top links on Google once or twice now. I'd like to point out that both times it led to a privated subreddit with an explanation of the protest, so it was great to see it's a message that definitely reaching outside of reddit itself.
I've since installed an extension called uBlacklist to avoid making that mistake again, at least for the next week or so.
I like using uBlacklist just for filtering out garbage Quora results. I swear I have NEVER found a single correct answer on Quora. Nobody has any clue what they are talking about when they reply to a question.
Quora is one of the worst offenders for this kind of search result trashening, along with Pinterest for images. I think the part about Quora that really gets me is that it's just as wildly incorrect as answers on Yahoo! Answers were, but they're not even bad in a funny way. It's just an incredibly long-winded way of showing you the Dunning-Kruger graph image.
My main issue with blacklist-type extensions for Google (when I still used Google) though was how much it screwed with pagination. After I blocked everything that I hated seeing, there would be like one or two results on the first page.
What do you use instead of Google now?
Kagi, it's a paid search engine with a few nice QoL features like being able to filter out "listicle" type results as well as blacklist / downrank / promote domains of your choice. I try not to mention it straight away when I'm posting about search as I really don't want to come off as a shill. It's definitely still not perfect by any means (I think the general quality of the internet has decreased so there's not really much you can do about that) but at least I don't have to see a page entirely full of results I won't click anyway.
Thank you! I just discovered Kagi this week too from another comment so I was wondering if there was another I should be aware of too.
Did you ever try Duck Duck Go, and how do you feel like it compares to Kagi as far as search results?
No, I had no interest in DDG after finding out about the whole Microsoft thing with them. If I wanted a search engine that had deals with big tech I'd just stick with Google.
This seems like it may be a relevant point to at least one reason why Google have been pushing to not just provide links to the information you're looking for, but the information itself - You've probably noticed how many searches deliver more and more Google provided content including the 'People also ask' and 'Things to know' drop downs, the 'Featured Snippets', and sometimes even a big sidebar with information scrapped from all over.
Don't have to rely on the proclivities of other parties if you scrap up all the data and deliver it yourself. Particularly with the integration of AI into search, it wouldn't surprise me if eventually the old model of search engines designed to best get you to where you're going eventually shift into something far more siloed.
At Google I/O this year, they previewed a big expansion of their direct answer responses.
But it creates a perverse incentive: When you short-circuit a site's organic traffic, the websites you're scraping build their walls higher. Reportedly, OpenAI's use of Reddit data in its training corpus was the thing that kicked off the current mess.
However, the genie is out of the bottle. Even if the FTC came down hard on Google for this, there's little incentive for sites to tear their walls down. So it's hard to see a path back.
Another thing that may happen alongside higher walls is that many sites from which Google et. al. scrap their data from may just fade away as traffic is siphoned away. Which, if it occurred, would also hurt those who rely on those same sites for their content. Particularly those megalithic entities which require constant growth to justify their existence, it may end up being a tragic flaw leading themselves fading as well.
(of course, predicting the future is notoriously difficult so who knows what will end up happening on this wonderful, horrible, strange collection of tubes)
Yeah does anyone serious (and savvy) about searching for something these days do regular searches anymore? I always search with Reddit.
Like when I want to know how a product is I go to Reddit every time vs other review methods.
Reddit is still so hard to replace…
I tried explaining this to someone like a week ago, I knew my job would get increasingly more difficult without my Google search with "reddit" at the end. They had no clue. Haha.
I already used reddit for most of my questions because as the article states, it is (usually) actual humans giving me their feedback or answers. This solidifies how to me how much of a valuable tool it is. Too bad about management.
I've actually moved into asking ChatGPT for some of the troubleshooting answers now. It's not entirely right... (but then again neither are all forum posts for that matter) and it kind of gives me a way forward. I've asked it to go back and search its data for what reddit users have recommended for certain questions and it's actually a decent stop gap at the moment.
I bet chat uses reddit for it language models and information
I turned on the "Search Generative Experience" lab in Google, which gives me results that rank a few notches below Reddit results, but several notches above the SEO AI-written garbage that dominates the first 20 results.
I didn't realize how many people used Google to find information and used reddit as the source. I think I've googled a few things and clicked on reddit sources for video game things but not more than a handful of times.
If it's product or service related I am going to Reddit results first. The key is real discussion between real people, not paid for reviews or other spam/junk. And on Reddit it's fairly easy to quickly check a person's comment history so it's much easier to spot shills.
I'm sorry I'm very late to the party but this blackout made me very invested in ChatGPT. I ask the extremely obscure tech issues to it instead of doing a search.
Also, apparently forums still exist. But they're a shell of their former selves.
We really, really need some place to ask around niche tech questions; not serious sites like SO/SE tho.
After getting fed up with Google (and being a fan of startups), I've been using Kagi for the past year. Sorry if it sounds shilling, but check it out if you want. You can use DDG bangs, custom ones, or even Google if necessary. Overall, a lot more organic results.
More so on topic, Google still seems to have the "most" of the internet indexed, but they push so much junk on the front page that's either written by AI, paid for, or both.
I just signed up for the one-time trial. I think I like it so far, but I find myself very aware that each search is metered against my quota so I hesitate before submitting each search.
Which plan did you sign up for? I’ve got no idea how many searches I do each month but I feel like it must be hundreds.
I'm grandfathered in at the "Early Supporter Plan" or whatever they call it @ $10/m or $120/year, which allows unlimited searches (for now...they were going to limit it to 1500? I think). If anything, it made me better at searching using different bangs and terms than I was before. The discord has a lot of custom queries people have made.
If I were to go into it now, I'd probably be on the unlimited plan since my monthly total usually exceeds the metered offerings. Also, it's cut down on my "lazy searching," eg, typing in "CNN local news" vs. typing in "Cnn.com" and clicking on the local news tab.
Good to know, thank you! I’ll try signing up and see how it goes - I appreciate the premise of what they’re offering for sure.