Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts
theverge.com
theverge.com
Even then I'm finding that Wikipedia's quality has dropped dramatically in recent years. As they become more zealous about only including "encyclopedic information", I'm increasingly finding pages that have had all of their useful information sucked out of them.
No! The rest of the content is still there, loads of it. Google simple has stopped caring, no it is not "too hard", they just don't care enough.
Case in point, Google even aids in crappy results, by aliasing your search terms, preventing precision, putting monetization above all else.
Google sucks. SEO/spam is not worse, Google is, they know it, they do not care, because so far it has no affected profit negatively.
GitHub
Stackoverflow
Even Hacker News
Quality goes way way up depending on topic.
I kinda wish Google would apply some more personalized ML to my searches
Anyway, I can’t think of any searches where appending stuff like that wouldn’t be universally beneficial (or detrimental), so I don’t see the personalization angle.
Bing seems to surface a lot more unrelated or spam my websites at the top of the results.
Every time I stumble in to google I am appalled at how bad the UX is.
TIL[0]:
> Layer 8 is a term used to refer to user or political layer on top of the 7-layer OSI model of computer networking.
Think about what OP said here for a second:
>every time I can’t find something I switch to Google and find the answer right away
If you assume both Google and Bing to be similarly good but not the same, then you would expect this to happen.
Say there are two sets of websites, the ones that Bing finds (B+) and some that it doesn't (B-).
The same would hold for Google, there would be G+ and G-.
Now if you search on Bing first, and find what you need, you stop. This is a result in B+.
If you don't find it, your result is in B-. Then you search in Google and maybe get a G+ result, since they have different sets of websites they find.
You might also not find it (G-) but in the end both search engines aren't that bad, so this rarely happens.
Now you might find the same result if you start on Google instead, and aren't lucky in the first go, and then try Bing.
Refute the opinion, or add something of value, instead of simply sneering.
Reddit does this thing where it advertises other threads on the same page of whatever you're viewing. So sometimes the promoted content was the thing actually relevant to the search and not the current thread. And this would be fine except it's not static/deterministic. The promoted content usually changes between when it's indexed and when it's accessed at a later time - so the thing that made it relevant to the search often isn't there anymore. So you have to either view the cached paged if available, go back and try different results, or refine your search.
They do now and the first thing they want to do is to sell their content to AI labs for millions/year.
It's not a lot of sites (yet), but it's making the web get smaller, and worse, it's affecting the most useful and interesting parts of the web more than the commercial stuff.
It's kinda on us to ensure that it's only in the interregnum that we have the morbid and dysfunctional symptoms.
I've also found that if I search for something directly on Reddit, I get all sorts of results. Some related, some tangential. And a lot of the time there's porn or NSFW content mixed in.
Works especially great for horror movies, for us at least. I don't always quite understand why I may have vibed so well with a particular horror film since they can be so hit-or-miss between individuals, but other people who are more genre-savvy will be in the comments to explain it to me and have some great recommendations :)
I expect open source will follow suit in either removing projects or sealing them off.
Similarly, companies will limit access to ensure monetisation.
No one wants their work stolen to train ais and then monetised for not even a mention in exchange.
The dead internet is even more likely to happen.
I feel (or perhaps hope) the spirit of FOSS precludes the notion of "stealing." Besides, open source is no stranger to being monetized for the bare minimum mention required by whatever license.
Taking GPL'd code and redistributing it without making the source available IS stealing. It is community code. If you want to use it, you have to give back. Otherwise pick something with a BSD or MIT license.
... copyright infringement. Against which you might want to lawyer up and sue in court, if you feel litigious (and have have deep pockets to pay for the expenses, or someone else does it for you). But is nowhere as clear cut as stealing, like you mentioned.
I should have been more clear, my point wasn't really on the semantics (and inexactitude) of "stealing." I can agree with your usage in this context.
This will just lead to forks (if your project was popular).
Forking code is not an issue - i can fork half of github and it wont mean much without maintenance.
Well....yeah? open source doesn't mean you don't have to do anything to make it work. Many times I've forked a project, cleaned up maintenance issues so it ran on my instance, and then did a pull request so the original author could incorporate the update.
While we are blessed with many turn-key projects that require little more installation effort than following detailed instructions, FOSS is supposed to be a community effort, not something falling on the shoulders of a tiny maintenance team.
It's also that google is getting worse. It has been slowly declining in quality for a very long time.
Search incentives SEO hacking. SEO hacking causes searches engines to stick to weigh reputation scores more. Reputation scores favor large social media platforms that have strong moderation practices. Quora, reddit, and other platforms become more valuable than SEO hacked blog spam.
This has to be one of these most useless sites on the Internet and it blows my mind how frequently the content from this site is exposed via Google search. Now that I think about it, I think I should probably just block it on my local DNS server.
uBlacklist?
At this point I don't think it's ignorance, it's malice: A deliberate dark-pattern to drive "engagement" by layering in unrelated crap.
Great point you bring up on how useless <website> is. As the CEO of <random company>, this is a problem we have put a lot of effort into addressing. You may consider the following as a solution: …
But also they can use it for LLM training and put it into the Google index.
Man, those were the days.
google.*###rso .MjjYud a[href*="reddit.com"]:upward(.MjjYud)https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1479c7b/histor...
It looks like Reddit is going to let them resume, but with access restricted to Reddit moderators:
https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...
Other sites, like archive.org and Google, scrape and archive Reddit pages, but coverage is spotty at best.
The thing is google is still working just as it was ... the fact the results are dead atm is beside the point.
A person visiting old bookmarks to reddits that are unavailable at the moment could say the same, their bookmarks aren't working. I wouldn't author an article about bookmarks not working as such ...
Yes, Google is working as normal, but "normal" is terrible and posts on Reddit made Google results less terrible. If Google's results are so bad that I feel the need to limit the results to Reddit, then it's probably a problem with Google and the type of sites that it has incentivized over the years (i.e., spam).
You should see the basic search page google hands me to use and has been that way the last 7 or so years. Then again, I used to be a very heavy user of google, multiple switches or operators for each advanced search, a habit from the times when that's all I did all day long. Before they made it hard for me, I bypassed their BS limit of f'all they eased in instead of the 100 results a page if one wanted and I crawled though multiple search pages and a few dozen results to land credible information to exclude echoes.
I know google results have dropped off the deep end, but framing reddit going dark as being of significant impact to search results is not honest. Yes, the result these people want is now inaccessible - it's not a new thing, results that are inaccessible are not unexpected. It's no different to the many deep searches I've done in the past and found what might have been useful results, were actually private unless one agrees to sell up their tracking data or the site was behind a pay wall.
I'd agree, Google and the like incentivised spam by shrugging for a start and then realising clutter gets more clicks and ads served.
I understand a lot of people are annoyed that many useful reddits are dark at the moment, a honest conversation would acknowledge that, rather than handing out prizes to those who the most upset about the protest.
In your opinion it is not honest, and many people disagree with you. This is an example of the “dosis sola facit venenum” or the dose makes the poison. Some random forum post you came across in a deep search that no longer can be accessed is barely noticed. The size of reddit and how weighted it has become to google users is why google search results are now poisoned. If you want to understand the issue, you have to step out of your own specific uses and look at how a large percent of people use google searches.
If a grocery store loses access to a couple products a month, shoppers would barely notice. If they lose access to 20% of products that are normally on the shelves, that is significant and will effect customer behavior.
I know people have the last couple or so years been focusing results using reddit, but it changes little - results are there, just for the moment those results are dark.
If they want technical stuff they might soon learn to use inurl:stackexchange ...
Whether or not I have struck the few no longer available / exists pages was actually quite irrelevant, it was just stated to point out dead pages are not unexpected.
Edit typo.
If the grocery store is relying on one supply chain for a large percent of their products, and they lose access to that supply chain, it is the grocers' issue. Saying "well technically it is a supply issue and could happen to any business" is missing the point when shoppers are displeased with what is available. Saying it is really reddit's fault is missing the point that Google SEOed itself into a position where they did not have a robust supply chain to relevant results people were searching for and now their results shelves are empty.
However even that modified example, still doesn't really reflect on the problem the average user will insist what a great trick it was to use reddit to try and focus results. The average user unknowingly ignore a lot of other areas on the web that they could be using to focus what they're looking for. I guess that's one of the things A.I. will be able to do, something similar to what the old google search algorithm used to work where it seemed like google could work out of the number of search terms which word was a focus word (often a broad term to cover the field the rest might be common in.)
Like I stated in the last reply, a site going dark, it's not a google problem. Google's search has sucked for a few years ... and I know for all the hard to find or failed things I couldn't find since whenever, including reddit would have had zero effect.
chatgpt has improved search for me by orders of magnitude. Especially since google has started to border on useless.
Bur searching reddit? Meh. Not for technical stuff at least.
Niche high quality subs may point me in the right direction. Like r/ponds for example. Wonderful little sub.
r/doggroomers is absolute shit mostly full of shaming dog owner pics and toxic comments.
r/programming was great 8 years ago. Now I doubt any human over 18 posts there.
Honestly if reddit never comes back again I think the interwebs have gained a level in quality as it is just a toxic echo chamber for young people who think they are some form of superiour liberals.
Good riddance.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UTV/comments/q9mqyo/looking_to_buy_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/UTV/comments/13li1iq/is_3500_lb_eno...
Frankly, I'm stunned you haven't had a single time where something useful came from a reddit discussion; sure, topical forums are usually better for very specific knowledge but for many cases it's great. And obviously you need to be able to sift through the bullshit but we deal with that already daily with Google results.
Found reviews of a couple of products and then chatted up someone who said a couple of days earlier was gonna test some of them. It feels like a community of people who care about stuff.
I think you're just bashing it for the sake of it.
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I realized that looking for reviews like this I would look for reviews in my local language, which you probably can't.
If you need to actively find a review for some item you want to buy it's probably not that great of an item imho.
Furthermore, 4chan has no search feature so I don't know how that's even equivalent.
/g/ has "an audiophile general" for example that comes with recommended places to buy, tierlists and reviews.
The problem with reddit is that just because someone recommends a product, doesn't mean they actually bought/experienced it. That being said it is a great way to find a product's defects, as people usually post to reddit.
What are the chances of Reddit adding red tape for removing subreddits?