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Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

The commercial opinion bit is incredibly annoying. Ask for an opinion and you’ll get 5 pages of custom built “review” sites that offer nothing useful besides copious ads and paid click-through to Amazon.

Even when Google knows where I go with my searches, they still refuse to show those sites for anything that might have commercial interest. So much for customized search. I get tired of being the product. Can we get a subscription search engine that’s actually good? I’d pay for that.

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I literally append "site:reddit.com" like in the article whenever I'm looking for reviews and comparisons. Google is nearly useless for finding content among the sea of crap and autogenerated near-crap (like Slant). I might click on the links going to sites that I half-remember by name, but for open-ended searches it's a lost war.

> I literally append "site:reddit.com"

Stop saying that! The more people repeat that on HN, the more we risk advertisers realizing it and doing reddit-targeted SEO and reddit will be useless too!

(I'm only half joking)

Also, it's funny, I was just reading the thread about malaria eradication and DDT-resistant mosquitoes; the problem of SEO is eerily similar (any countermeasure is eventually defeated by evolution).

You are 10 years too late for that concern. I often wonder if there are any real people commenting, submitting, or upvoting left on Reddit.

I wouldn't go that far. There are tons of real people on it. A big problem problem though is the user base is so large and concentrated that it disguises the massive amounts of bots and "hidden" advertisement posts that get mixed in. And that low quality content drags the entire community down as "legitimate" posts are forced to compete for views/karma which was not their end-goal in the first place.

Reddit works when it isn't a competition, but advertising has made it a competition with a profit motive.

When using reddit, you need to stay away from the default subs. They are a timesink and repetitive, and because of the volume of users, the comments all start looking the same. People who were introduced through the mobile app usually make a lot of use of them.

You need to stick to the topic oriented subreddits. r/homelab for example.

I totally agree that the niche subreddits often have the best discourse.

I spend a lot of time on reddit and do not identify with your comment at all.

There’s real people for sure, but most of them are children and teenagers who are easily susceptible to corporate propaganda. I often wonder when a competitor will arise so that I can leave Reddit, and it’s rolling release of bad UX, for something better. At this point I would pay a monthly fee for a decent Reddit.

Plenty of competitors have risen over the years. They've have just all been abject failures. Most have tried to fix at least one aspect of the site and failed to do so. I don't even think a straight up copy would work at this point. Its got the user base and while never directly profitable, its value has always been in how easy it is to shill to the userbase. I think that's primarily why Advance keeps it.

Those children and teenagers are often more knowledgeable on the topic I'm searching for (especially with regards to gaming equipment), so I'm happy to take their opinion like anyone else's.

That said, a paid reddit would be a ghost town. It's against the spirit of the site.

This is emphatically not the case in my experience.

10 years later

Users: Now if I want good results, I append site:news.ycombinator.com before every query.

Advertisers: Hmmm...

I already tend to search hackernews first (with its dedicated search engine) for infocom-related queries !

Ditto for wikipedia and wikitionary, which are hopefully immune to advertising..

I find that Reddit is mostly useful for things with a small audience like local restaurants, so they're unlikely for recommendations to be fake.

For consumer goods, I find that trustworthy Youtube channels, like America's Test Kitchen, do a much better job with reviewing things anyways.

Evolutionary arms races are extremely common, especially between parasites and their hosts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race

The same thing happens in our societies. It's a constant never-ending struggle.

That worked for awhile. But even Reddit has been overrun with coordinated marketing efforts to make sure you can't really get an honest review without checking every comments post history.

> even Reddit

no, reddit? i'm shocked /s

your implication seems to be that reddit should somehow be resistant to parasitic capitalism. reddit has been compromised and on the side of the advertisers since the beginning.

> reddit has been compromised and on the side of the advertisers since the beginning.

reddit today is very different from reddit of early days, its practically unrecognizable.

Exactly. HN of today is a very similar experience to what Reddit used to be. The King is dead. Long live the King!

Also try appending:

But why aren't you using reddit's own search engine directly ?

Google modified the algorithm a while back to ignore such flags at times.

They did a bad job then, since they still work.

They still use the flags, just not in every instance. I recall the quotes for inclusion of strings and the "-site" flag failing for me as early as last year.

Yes they do ignore those but at this moment they don’t ignore site: queries. Google also suffers heavily from old content, and even changing the date under the tools section doesn’t work for some reason. I think because it goes by when the page was last updated and sites like Reddit update them automatically very frequently

I thought that was several years ago already? Anyway, on Duckduckgo it still works.

Thankfully, using a WorldWideWeb search engine for this is only necessary for the somewhat rare websites whose own search engines suck.

Even for programming topics, sites like gitmemory routinely rank higher than the original GitHub repos and StackOverflow answers that they are "mirroring", or the mirror page gets full result billing while the original StackOverflow answer only gets a single title line in the "other results from site" format.

Google could easily lower pagerank for blogspam by measuring density of affiliate links.

They don't, because low quality consumerist search results make the ads fit right in. Also those sites are more likely to contain Google Ads themselves.

The search engine is fully optimized for consumerism, not finding the most relevant result.

How about p2p FLOSS search engine: https://yacy.net?

Thank, I was despairing about DuckDuckGo not having their own crawlers and the many issues with Qwant. This looks promising !

Just curious - how much would you pay for that? $20/mo? $30/mo?

One one hand I completely agree, and hope for paid service alternatives to all these "free" products. On the other hand, I can find everything I need through Google, as is, so why pay for an alternative?

I ended up with "site:bbc.com" and "site:svt.se" to get to actual news instead of click-baits. Why the search function of these sites is crap, to the point where it's easier to hack Google, is beyond me.

Subscription services' weak spot is that they are incentivized to pander to you hard and reinforce your biases. A subscription search engine would just create the ultimate echo chamber

Yes, building one. Details in my profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20652151

subscription service on the rise!

Brave is releasing one soon.

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