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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The Internet has been slowly getting gutted since at least 2015.
It is to the point that a regular search engine is useless for actual research unless you are a power user and even then it is censored.
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Ducks fly together! Brave search is pretty decent too, if you haven’t tried it yet.
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It’s called enshittification for a reason.
What does the “en” prefix accomplish in that word?
The reddit thing was even described as a “hack” to google search iirc
It’s not all Google’s fault though. With the obliteration of online news and forums, there just isn’t much indexable content out there that isn’t trash. It’s only getting worse with AI spitting out garbage remixes of the same crap on pages that post more ads than content. Reddit was a bastion of real content written by real humans delivered in a mostly friendly way.
So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve? No one wants the trash content. The next “best” thing is Quora and that’s entirely hostile even if it manages to accidentally contain valid content.
Corporate has managed to destroy the Internet.
So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve?
Google has the entire Deja News (Usenet) archive, more valuable than Reddit except for the older age. And they don’t let you access it anymore.
What are they doing with it?
Google is doing nothing with their Usenet archive. Hopefully they haven’t destroyed it.
DuckDuckGo manages it mostly fine. At least, the results are more consistent, even if there’s the 1-in-50 chance it misses something Google would get.
The cynic in me suspects that Google makes their real results worse to increase ad results which are “close enough.”
Quora feels most of time is where humans try to write like an AI.
I instinctively scroll down 1-2 screens now to get past all the ads and promoted pages. It’s like Amazon the few times I use that. Fully enshittified. I just use Bing most of the time which isn’t any better.
I started using Swisscows about a year ago and I’m never going back. Clean, simple, uncluttered. No trackers or “personalization”.
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Took a bit for me to even figure out what “moral values” was supposed to mean in this context.
Turns out they just think porn is evil and that children hate being exposed to it or something. https://swisscows.com/en/media-education
No true crime and no tiddies? Is there even anything on that search engine?
I can’t stand searching for a product on Amazon anymore. If I really want to use Amazon, it’s much more efficient to find the amazon link using duck duck go.
Ublock is your friend
Not even joking, I was trying to search for something just slightly niche the day before yesterday and I got so fed up with Google that I actually used Bing. And you know what? It was noticeably better. We truly went down the wrong pantleg into this universe.
So much this.
Yeah, this is something I thought about as soon as the blackout started. I am in the IT world and as soon as it happened, it got really difficult to find certain bits of crucial information, because those bits of info were stored within Reddit comments.
Anyone in the tech world can tell you that besides Stack Overflow and Github, Reddit is right up there among the most leaned-on tech resources these days. Never before was there a bigger forum of tech people discussing their work. Those results were suddenly, instantly no longer valid, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed that. This is part of why Reddit was scrambling to open subs back up - if more than 2 or 3 weeks went by, Google would have removed those listings from the search.
"Another employee question in the companywide meeting asked if Google can more easily surface “authentic discussion” since the “Reddit blackout” was making it harder to find such content.
CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in to to say that users don’t want “blue links” as much as they want “more comprehensive answers.”
No I’m pretty sure people really are looking for authentic discussion, twisting that to say that we want more comprehensive answers is clearly Pichai trying to make the situation fit what he already wants to do: implement generative AI in response to searches to keep people on the site.
I just checked the perspectives tab, since I’m on mobile. I guess Google wants people to be less reliant on Reddit, but it’s like… User-generated content on Reddit vs. Twitter/Tiktok/Youtube are not the same? Usually I put “reddit” in the search bc I want a quick and well-informed text-based answer to something. That’s still going to be the easiest thing to do.
Text is why I always add reddit to a search too. I do not want a video in response to my search, pretty much ever, and on the rare occasion I do, I go straight to YouTube.
I don’t understand how YouTube results from Google are so fucking useless. How is it not returning the same results you’d get if you searched on YouTube? Who designs this shit?
There are some high quality forms out there. G really needs to hook into these forums and the fediverse if they need to replace the reddit content.
Yeah that will be the thing I miss the most when looking for stuff as I try to rely less on reddit.
I get so tired of trying find information via blogs or YouTube. Most of them are:
“So you may have an issue doing this thing or you want to learn more about this thing so we are going to tell you about this thing. Blah blah blah as they go on telling you in different ways about how they are going to tell you and other reasons why you want to hear what they are about to tell you.”
Mostly seems to be a way to make you scroll down and be bombarded with ads (if you do not use an ad block)
Soo frustrating and waste of my time.
At 10-11 minutes they get a second ad roll, so 99% of videos are about this length.
It’s almost a certainty that a 2:30 video has more information than an 11:01 video.
It’s shocking to see how bad they’ve become at what used to be their core function. I mean their brand name became the verb for looking something up on the internet. Now it just returns a useless mix of advertising, blogspam, AI spam, and sometimes-useful reddit results.
I’m also not quite happy with the search experience due to them constantly moving UI components around randomly. First they started shuffling around the order of the search tabs (All, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) erratically, and now they’ve also decided to also start including what they believe may be related search terms there as well, sometimes.
Google would probably like to take over the user generated content somehow. If people can find it on Google even when it is not available on Reddit then it is pure profit for Google. They already provide a lot of information on their search pages bypassing the sources. Google is not our friend. Not any more.
Google would probably like to take over the user generated content somehow. If people can find it on Google even when it is not available on Reddit then it is pure profit for Google
All they would have to do is start Deja News (the most famous free Usenet server and archive) back up. They could do it tomorrow if they wanted to. And I guarantee you it would be talked about on /s/redditalternatives and /m/RedditMigration
To get a genuine opinion on “what is the best [whatever]” is an impossibility now with result after result of Amazon affiliate lists of utter garbage.
Try to compare 2 pieces of computer hardware and be faced with results from UserShitMark or other affiliate laden shitbags.
Google Search is ruined with all the inorganic shit it gravitates to.
That was probably the only good thing reddid offered, google searches.
Whenever I had a tech related issue I added reddit at the end and I knew I’ll find the solution instead of going through MS and other official sites who for some reason had the thread as solved but no solution to be found.
