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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on "the best impact hammer" or "how to buy solar panels" without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I'll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you'd eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I'm grateful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I remember being good at google-fu, and then thinking my google-fu was failing me.

No, it was the Google that failed me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course they are. Adding "Reddit" at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It depends what you were searching for. For help with Stable Diffusion or programming questions or other technical subjects, the reddit communities were actually one of the best places I could go to for answers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They still are on archive.org. you'll get the info you need and reddit gets nothing. Win win

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

It's going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.

Google's got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now...can't find shit. And it's about half its own fault.

I'll put right around half of the blame on "platformization." Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn't get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what's there. Twitter is slightly more open...but not really.

The other half of the problem is Google's own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.

That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they've gotten in the habit of appending "reddit" to google search strings because a. that's where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit's own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn't work so well.

So what are we keeping them around for?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven't used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I'm going to a specialized information website, for buying things I'm looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I've grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I'm having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I didn't realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It's just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Google search is a pain from a year ago.

When searching for something on Google, you should include terms like “Reddit”, “superuser”, “Stack Overflow”, etc., to get better results. Because if you don't include them, the first page of Google looks like a bot-generated page. Of course, Google are ‘not quite happy’.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.

In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we've built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn't, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add "site:reddit.com" to the query. But if the niche communities die, that's a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.

So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit's own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won't realise this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.

My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.

Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I'm new) smacks of the "old Internet." I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there's so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that's why they don't see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on.. So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far.. and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they've been worse than competitors for years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, no kidding. Google's been getting lazy with its search results. The first dozen hits on most Google searches are either YouTube or Reddit results.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The YouTube videos that should have been a post or an article shoved down your throat are aggravating.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My biggest concern with the downfall or even small proportional depopulation of Reddit is 100% going to be /r/sysadmin and /r/msp not being the best place to determine if there is an actual outage in progress for various cloud based IT services. I mean, it's a real, legit concern to worry over if you're in IT.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy has one comm for Dev/Ops I think but not the convenience of having a place for network guys, sysadmins, and programmers all in different spots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Current way to search on google for me is: Add reddit to search string, and set data to before may 1st 2023 Copy link suggested by google and change reddit to reveddit or any of the alternatives there

Results will go out of date but maybe this will tide me over until a good lemmy search is up and running.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Say the execs of the company who has ruined the internet with seo crap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.

If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It would be cheaper for google to just buy reddit, remove the adds and open the api's again.

Having relevent search results is priceless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

remove the adds

lol, this is google we're talking about

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Reddit.com appears on KilledByGoogle.com next year.

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