Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
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?
Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don’t feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.
I’m using startpage.com for a few months now, I’m surprisingly quite happy with the quality of search results.
Ecosia has been pretty okay for me. Additionally, they are a non-profit that plants trees based off user usage.
DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.
https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.
https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.
But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.
Not sure i like metered searches… and $25/month seems steep for unlimited.
But i will try this out, i would gladly pay for actually good search. Maybe keep google for simple web navigation then the $5 tier kagi for more nuanced search, should keep under the 300 search limit with that approach
I use Kagi and never pay more than $10/mo even though I use it a lot. I think most people don’t know how much they search in a month, so the pricing can be confusing.
I have the early adopter pro plan, which gives me extra searches (1500 instead of 1000), but for reference, I averaged 1044 searches/mo over the past 6 months (not counting this month). So if I had the standard pro plan, I’d have paid $10.66 per month on average.
The unlimited plan seems excessive to me, unless you’re playing with the API or something like that.
Startpage is pretty good.
Kagi is a premium search engine that aims to have the highest quality search results. They use algorithms to surface up more indie content, like blogs, and downrank tracker-heavy pages and blog/SEO spam. The difference between Kagi and Google is night and day.
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.
That’s why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.
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.
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.
Yeah this, it’s demented.
I will google something specific that I know is on the internet and it comes back with ten ridiculously off-topic AI spam blogs and “no further results.”
It’s more important than ever then to make sure that this place stays a place for people, and not bullshit.
I have been using GPT4 as a Google replacement and it’s been working out fairly well.
Which is great… until it becomes influenced by all the other AI generated crap.
undefined> 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.
Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos
First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we’re ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we’ll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.
I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I’m sure it’s a people circle thing.
It’s way too easy to use Twitter and complain… it’s way to easy to use reddit … (if you use their app) and complain.
I don’t think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.
Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I’ve gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse… so would I get that experience here ever? Idk… but it’s a minus for me.
Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don’t see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.
Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.
Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it’s an okay vid.
My understanding is plugin is alright (I have it too), but it’s increasingly inaccurate, especially for videos uploaded after it was created. I believe it took data from YouTube before the dislikes were removed and uses that as a snapshot, then adds the thumbs up/down of users of the plugin and uses that to extrapolate trends from the very limited data it has coming in.
The real solution would be YouTube showing the scores again, but I guess their stupid corporate videos getting BTFO was too much for them.
The plugin you are mentioning is based on dislikes and yes it is very inaccurate. The one I mentioned works off of the ratio between the likes vs the view count so the accuracy is always there, it’s a different way of going about it.
I agree that YouTube just needs to bring the dislike count back, it’s a pain trying to find these alternative ways to know if a video is good when the data is there. It’s so greedy of them, outright harming user experience for profit.
there’s a browser plug in for that.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.
I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.
Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?
You’d have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you’d be able to tease out any bias that exists.
Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.
The last couple of times I’ve had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.
If it keeps up this way, we’re going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.
Google sucks now at giving me information. It seems like now it just gives me products.
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).
That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.
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
They still are on archuve.org. you’ll get the info you need and reddit gets nothing. Win win
Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error
It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google
I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years. I never realized how bad Google had gotten until I searched on a public computer where it was the default.
What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.
It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers
What were you searching?
An error log for some Scala code, tried the usual thing of Googling full error log, key words etc and nothing really returned any actual useful results (or none at all)
Put the full log into Bing and the first few results were straight from stack overflow and a raised GitHub issue describing the errors cause
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.
Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn’t restore your comments? They’ve been doing that to a bunch of people.
So far they have not.
You still can request a data export to see what they still have.
As a plus point if your GPDR request was logged and they can’t fulfill it in 90 days they will be fined.
They won’t be fined if you don’t report it
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I literally couldn’t find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.
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You can add date restrictions in Google search. Very helpful.
I can see it on the localized version of Google where I’m at.
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We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)
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i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling “how to x site:reddit.com”, we’ll just fedisearch “how to x”
in fact, i’m pretty sure i already found one but it wasn’t very good, and i’ve forgotten it’s name
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.
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.
What’s even more annoying than google populating half the first page with ads is that the links don’t even work half the time these days.
If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it’s safe to assume chat GPT’s training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.
That would explain why it’s all written like wiki content edited by a redditor.
Fuuuuuuck… Imagine if chat GPT started amending its results with… “EDIT: wElL tHiS bLeW uP oVeRnIgHt… tHaNkS fOr ThE gOlD kInD ReDdiToR”
That’d be so damn annoying haha
Like that story of a child saying “remember to like and subscribe” at bedtime because she thought that was the words for goodbye
Wait is that some kid IRL? Or we talking about gpt speaking as a child?
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.
That tracks so much. The two big I social media paltforms I was involved in were Facebook and Reddit. My distrust in Facebook/Meta is so large, I’m willing to block any fediverse instance that federates with them. And Reddit’s only chance to get me back would be to become a trust-managed nonprofit within at most a year (but only if that’s how long it would take to implement if they started to go that way within the next few weeks).
Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.
Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.
Months? You mean weeks.
Are you saying they were going to… regReddit?
First they will rename it few times, Reddit+, RedditOut, RedditWave then merge it will Google Groups wait for a year and then pull the plug.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.
The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.
I haven’t been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it’s just stupid crap that isn’t helpful. ‘Here’s 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.’
How to fix your tech problem:
- restart
- the same generic fix you already saw on the last 10 websites that didn’t work
- download our totally legit software that’s specially designed to fix this exact issue
Yep, that’s exactly it. Every fkn search result.
I’m in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google’s attempt to be useful was to to search for “baluster” instead of “banister”. It’s a complete fucking joke.
And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you’ve ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I’m located in the US.
Also is it just me, or did search engines (not just Google) suddenly start disregarding quotation marks a year or so ago? I’ve been adding quotes to tell the stupid thing “no, I really did mean that weird word you think is a typo” and lately it just fucking auto-incorrects it anyway!
It’s awful and it’s sad. I remember when I could find everything on there and now it’s just all garbage. I’d be pretty annoyed getting links outside the US when that’s where you live. Sure wish it was like it used to be.
The natural degredation of google just comes down to the incredibly stupid levels of search engine optimization and ads. Most articles in particular are so terrible, I’m convinced a lot of them are just written by bots. What I want are answers actually written by humans on discussion boards with a rating system. That’s what made me add “reddit” to the end of everything. Genuine humans, NOT people being paid to write articles or ads.
Not necessarily by bots, but a lot of product-related articles - say, “What’s the best washing machine?” or “What’s the best hot wire cutter?” or anything like that - will have multiple near-identical articles across multiple websites with links for each product generating a kickback for the author. Whereas Reddit was just people talking.
Articles like that are probably starting to be written by AI for sure though. You could write an article on every type of product that way, and get kickbacks from all of them, all while depriving people of actual useful info. Woo, innovation!
This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.
Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol
DuckDuckGo has great results IMO
DDG is my default search engine but there are some types of searches that it’s not good at yet, so I find myself often toggling between the two after I see that DDGs response isn’t going to cut it.
Earlier today I was searching for a really specific Python error message and google had zero results. I tried Yandex and got the correct result on the first response.
Each search engine seems to be optimizing for a certain type of query and answer.
Ive started going to chatgpt to help me out with errors i dont understand and google hasnt helped with
Same, it helps with a lot of issues and even skips the part where people are questioning why you even want to know that and how you’re doing it the wrong way and should do their way
Yesssss, me too. And often it gets to the right response on the first try which is the ultimate timesaver. This is why Google may be toast unless they can figure out how to integrate this.
The only caveat is that sometimes Chatgpt just hallucinates an answer or it’s incomplete, so you need a bit more dead reckoning to make sure you’re going the right way.
I find DDG has the same garbage AI generated content as Google. Also, search operators have been broken on DDG for years
DDG mostly gets its results from bing
we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
I liked them well enough, but recently is it just me or it seems like every time I reload a search by simply going back to the page, the ranking of the results immediately changes?
That is supper annoying to me, as now I can’t keep track of the results I opened easilyThis happens sometimes if you search for a new non-cached search phrase. It’ll give you a couple pages, then update it’s index and when you go back you’re on the updated index.
Interesting, but how come it never did that before? Did I just not notice?
I don’t know. I’ve noticed it happening for the last few months. Maybe they have the ability to update caches faster now and want to give the most fresh results. It can be irritating if you’re like me and like to click a result and then go back and open a bunch of results in new tabs.
Sounds plausible yeah, so I haven’t gone crazy haha, it really is annoying since usually the new results are also worse than the first batch in my experience. Guess I’ll just pick up the habit of opening everything in a new tab from the get go
the new results are also worse than the first batch in my experience.
FWIW I thought the same. Seems like every search engine turns to doo with time.
Would be a great moment for a great open source search engine to take everyone by storm, well, like that’s ever gonna happen…
Google Perspectives will highlight results from Quora? That’s the last thing I want.
For real. Looks like speedrunning digging one owns grave is becoming hella popular in silicon valley as of late. Everyone wants to set a new record.
Dear God, i hope that’s not true. Quora answer quality is probably worse than Yahoo answers; at least those were just shit posts, 90% of Quora answers are ads by the creator of some project in my experience
