Google execs admit users 'not happy' with search after Reddit blackouts | Hacker News Reader

Google execs admit users 'not happy' with search after Reddit blackouts

cnbc.com

35 pointsthunderbong12 comments

If appending "Reddit" really was that critical, this was never a sustainable situation anyway, and something more fundamental is now broken with Google search.

...But I seem to be in the minority that doesn't like appending Reddit. A few posts are interesting, but answers in most posts/comments I run into are low quality.

But when not appending "reddit" what you're left with is SEO optimized websites with much lower quality content. While Reddit comments might not get you the full picture, they still seem to be worth reading in many cases

This seems entirely due to the higher mod/user ratio on Reddit compared to the rest of the web, doesn't it?

As Reddit has just discovered, user moderation is harder to monetize.

My experience is the opposite. Google’s search results are total steaming garbage. The English language doesn’t have enough words to describe just how awful the situation is. And that’s before you disable ublock and realise all their results above the fold now are ads.

The only reason I use Google is because it’s a pretty good Reddit and Wikipedia search engine. It’s the only way to find genuine commentary or feedback about Thing or Subject.

Yes, but results from more focused forum/Q&A sites like Stackoverflow and HN still sometimes show up.

from the bottom of my heart: congratulations on making the web an unusable pile of garbage. It probably took a lot of effort, but you googlers incontestably pulled it off.

google [cooking recipe] 15 years ago: -> first result: text based bullet point list of ingredients, followed by concise how-to

google [cooking recipe] today: -> page after page of awful results where the data will be hidden in a monetized video and/or buried under a mile of irrelevant stories and ads

Crazy idea, Google buys the third party apps, keeps them running and pays the difference. Maybe requires an email to email a newsletter every month and monetize that. Or just buys Reddit.

They would probably wait for the IPO to fizzle out at least.

"This sounds like a brilliant idea at first, but is it? My guess is that the more obvious it becomes that the IPO is a failure, the more the reddit execs press hard on its enshitiffication. My guess is waiting for the IPO to fizzle might be too late. Instead I think a better long term approach would be buy reddit now, remove all ads, fix the useability issues"...

... is what I would say if I believed that google was able to run a social product, which I don't think.

Oh yeah, its a terrible idea, but waiting is what Google would do... And they would certainly fumble it either way.

Alternately you realize that selling a shitty company to another shitty company doesn’t suddenly create gold. Google doesn’t buy things to remove ads, they exist to put ads in places. It’s their primary business.

The shittiness of reddit should be a signal for others to start looking to replace them. Then reddit has to compete against something. Currently their only competition more or less is discord and I don’t think its a good ecosystem to replace reddit either.

After digg there was reddit. There needs to be a different site to compete and force reddit to either fix its corporate culture or slowly kill it off by offering a better experience.

Hoping for corpo google to come in and fix things is a joke.

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