Submitted 5 months ago by hotpot8toe@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.404media.co/google-is-the-only-search-engine-that-works-on-reddit-now-thanks-to-ai-deal/
DuckDuckGo, Bing, Mojeek, and other search engines are not returning full Reddit results any more.
To be fair, Reddit is no longer that good of a source for answers in the later years.
Quality drop in comments is insane. Sometimes it looks like Quora.
Also my collection of hobbies seems to match up well with the people who nuked their post history after the API-ocalypse. Even when I get good search results I click through and… so many deleted comments…
It irritates me that so many forums and media sites allow you to edit your posts at will. There’s one site I go to that I like very much - it has a 5 minute edit window, and after that, your post can no longer be edited. You can’t change what you said, pretend you never said things, etc, once you say something it remains. It would be nice if more sites were like that. Or at least, if you edit/delete something, for there to be an option to check the history to see what it used to be, so if you try to delete some comment you made people can still check it. Whether it’s informational, or it’s because you’re trying to hide something you said that you realize was actually super shitty and people are getting angry at you for it, I prefer things to stick.
As someone who hobby hops I’ve had to just accept reddit is just not a viable option anymore. I’ve been using YouTube (revanced) to learn and get tips. I miss the interactions with people though…
I was looking for Bluetooth speakers recommendations and it’s the first time I really noticed “generic bot replies” like “I’ve got this great product to recommend, not only is it good but it offers great sound quality as well! The product is [link to Amazon page]”
Gotta start searching using “before:” to get quality results…
I’m seeing bots promoted and sold to generate those kinds of replies, RIP internet, looking forward to SSN/DNA+background check review verification (I kid but I half dream of that privacy nightmare partially plugging the review fraud hole).
Am I bbbrrrregnant?
If we consider all possible outcomes on a galaxy scale, then No.
Lemmy Will be king soon…is there a Lemmy search engine?
Haha wtf are you saying Lemmy is now like what reddit was in 2016 and by the end of next year it will be like reddit is now.
Same reason for the downfall too: Activist mods and hands-off admins that don’t care if their mods harass.
Only a matter of time
Seems insulting to quora haha
Sometimes quora looks better.
Unfortunately often the only source when searching for something like a specific error with a SaaS product.
They should include reddit in the list of search engines that don’t work well with reddit
Seems anticompetitive
Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner
After seeing this news I just created this lemmy account. I hope people make the right decision and move on to lemmy.
It’s pretty good here.
And will continue to get better.
Heya jack, welcome aboard!
welcome, but maybe consider not using the world instance. it is pretty saturated and the point is to spread users out across many instances instead of having one monolithic one
Welcome.
Same here
Then welcome to you too! There’s a nice selection of apps if you haven’t tried them, since Lemmy has no financial incentive to limit access to the content.
Welcome!
Welcome and don’t feel shy to contribute!
If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week.
That’s absolutely insane… Reddit truly is making things awful. The “just add reddit” or “just add site:reddit.com” has been trash for a while because they bombard you with the “pwease use the app” and not showing more than like three comments at a time. It’s useless.
Reddit truly is making things awful.
They’re no longer interested in driving traffic to the site, is my guess. They’re far more interested in devising new ways to extract rents from the existing participant base. So rather than pay Google to prioritize their site, or incentivize Google to link to their site with internal content hygenie techniques, now they’re getting paid by Google to exclusively serve up content.
It’s useless.
The sheer volume of junk content, the amount of content that just shows up as deleted or archived, and the rate at which I’m served “Reddit” as a source of data when there’s no conceivable reason why it should be near the top of my search list is very frustrating.
I don’t get why Google would agree to pay for anything. Google can survive without Reddit, but Reddit will be hurt without Google and would eventually be forced to give in. Where’s that corporate greed when you need it?
The “just add reddit” or “just add site:reddit.com” has been trash for a while
Has that ever been true? I always assumed it was some sort of shadow marketing campaign to get people to look at reddit more. Pretending that one website is the only reliable source of answers on the internet is incredibly audacious, it always seemed very farfetched to suggest that
It’s not that it was the “only” source, it’s just that it would fit out a bunch of garbage articles like “top 10 best ways to blah blah blah”
“pwease use the app”
the ublock origin annoyances list can filter this out at least
This must be something extra to enable, how do I do it?
I mean, it’s unlikely anything of value has been posted to reddit in the last week anyway. Or like the last 2 years.
That’s fine. I don’t want Reddit results anyway.
Unfortunately (for me, I guess), appending ‘reddit’ is still the way to go for many queries…
I’ve notice a huge decline in the reliability of using this now that every company on earth knows about this trick. You’ll just be served up posts with 0-3 comments and few upvotes when searching for product reviews or recommendations for example.
The way the article is written you’ll still get existing information, just not new posts.
Really? For what queries though? I mostly look up tech troubleshooting when ime there are much higher quality results from forums or sometimes stack exchange sites
It’s honestly a travesty what’s happened to Reddit. If I want to search for a forum topic or something where random people give their honest opinions, Reddit was about the only place left on the internet and now that’s gone too.
I mean, the people still exist and the need for honest opinions is still there. We just need to find a new place where money isn’t such a big problem (although it will always be a problem to some degree). I really think a more stable and easy to use Lemmy could attract a large crowd.
Reddit has been viral marketing for over a decade. Very little of what is on there should be taken at face value in terms of reviews of products. The only thing it’s good for is to find information about fixes for things or some very broad generic info.
Niche subreddits were still good. Fuck the mains, but there was a lot of really good content, even very technical, in tightly focused communities like r/LocalLLaMA, etc. In a lot of ways the format of how conversations flow there work better (and worse) than stackoverflow. Still is good content, but I really can’t bring myself to go there because of the nasty shenanigans that spez put the communities through.
I really hoped for a while that Reddit would be the one to break the embrace, extend, extend, enshittify mold that so many great techs succumb.
But everyone has a sellout price and so the EEEE seems to be a law of nature.
Great, neither Google search or reddit work anymore. They deserve each other.
Every time I click a Reddit link now it’s just “download the app to verify your age” regardless of what it is
Oh good, I can’t view most reddit threads without an account anymore, so it’ll be nice to see those results go away.
Is Reddit dead yet?
Fuck You Reddit
Personally, I really wish it was as easy to search for Lemmy posts with a search engine as it is with Reddit. Idk, maybe I’m doing it wrong.
Weird, most of the results I get from Google’s search are from Quora (and they fucking suck). Google as a search engine has been going downhill for a while now.
Meh, fuck em. The tighter they make their circle the less useful it is.
Reminder that Kagi searches Lemmy which is great.
Still couldn’t get me to use it, I use DDG which can switch between search engines and search sites very quickly with it’s ! syntax (Everyone goes on about privacy, but this is pretty much it’s best feature). Google results are consistently the worst for me if I’m hitting multiple search engines
Good. They can both die in a fire.
Kinda bad for the rare useful stuff in there
As a Lemmy and Duck Duck Go user, this is a desired feature!
Best search meta is “searchterm -reddit +forum” anyway
Cool, I don’t go to any reddit links anymore anyways. Saves me the hassle of skipping over them.
I’m not understanding what stops a search engine from scraping a publicly accessible website. ?
Okay, hear me out, we should make a different service, like a network of computers where people can freely post information on some sort of page that other people can freely access without needing to log in to a million services. Maybe we could also add like little conversation boards to those to allow people to ask and answer questions, too.
Wild, I know, but I think there is some opportunity there.
Whenever google isn’t giving me proper results (so almost every time) I add “Lemmy” to the search and it gives me… Reddit links.
Welp, they did it. They fucking broke reddit. Again.
Honestly the percentage of Reddit posts that Google returns which still actually retain their info is dropping substantially for me. Last few times it pulled up a Reddit post that should have my answer instead had either the question or the answers I needed deleted.
Ha ha, Reddit went to the dark side and I abandoned them months ago. So who cares what they do now.
Boozilla@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy’s stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.
hotpot8toe@lemmy.world 5 months ago
tbh I’ve never seen a Lemmy link when searching for stuff. Is it too small to show up? Or do search engines not index Lemmy instances?
Dasnap@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’ve seen it a couple of times when searching on DDG.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
I’ve seen some when I appended “Lemmy” just like “Reddit”. But it relies on lemmy being in the domain name.
Also I assume even when people click on those results, they don’t get ranked much higher because it’s so many different domains while reddit is just one.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You could always add “site:lemmy.world” to your search. I commonly do that, as well as the same for reddit or stack overflow.
infeeeee@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Most of the originalish content on lemmy are linux related stuff, memes and porn. The latter 2 are mostly image/video based, so you don’t search for that very frequently and easily. I can see that in the future it will become a very relevant source of info in linux admin and user circles.
I go back to r*ddit sometimes for some local content which is non existent on lemmy. I see that the tech related subs are mostly dead there, or at least only shadows of their former selfs. E.g. go to r/linux, sort by top all time. In the first 100 results you will barely find anything posted after the exodus.
NotAnotherLemmyUser@lemmy.world 5 months ago
One of the major problems with Lemmy is that many posts get deleted and that nukes the comment section (which is where most of the answers will be).
I wish Lemmy deleted posts closer to how Reddit deletes posts - the post content should be deleted, but leave the comments alone.
Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Searx will show Lemmy results, at least on some Searx instances.
Image
Gerudo@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Twice I have come across links to lemmy, definitely not the norm though.
chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 5 months ago
I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Problem is that we’ll probably need a dedicated search engine for that. As answers are spread in lots of instances, some of them without “lemmy” in the name, I assume.
tea@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Seems like a solvable problem though. We have a list of federated servers inately built into activitypub, right? Just need to tag results from those servers as being linked to a “lemmy” keyword search.
I’m sure I’m oversimplifying it, but all the pieces are there, just need search engines to be smart about how they index. Since there are a couple of federation based models that would be good to index, not just lemmy, it would probably behoove them to figure it out.
xnx@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
Yeah but we need non technical stuff too which i what i hate about the ui and stuff mot trying to be made simpler for non tech people to start using lemmy. I want doctors, lawyers, and casual people asking questions about everyday items and stuff so i can search “best sleep mask lemmy” or any product category and find good discussions. Would also help if lemmy.com was an instance instead of just redirecting to lemm.ee
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I think we have to contribute our hours of UX assistance to see changes there. The brilliant engineers who donate their time probably both focus on working features first and specialize more in technical problem-solving than visual design.
Voyager is quite lovely btw!
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Highly doubtful.
The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:
Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.
I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast “site”. So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than “Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y”.
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 5 months ago
Ephemeral discord servers are awful because they don’t scale and they can only ever help the lowest common denominator of questions/issues. We need something else, but it has yet to present itself as a solution.
butter@midwest.social 5 months ago
Drop a link to a few places people ask tech questions and I will do my part to contribute
communism@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Really for technical answers things should be on a forum. Troubleshooting a linux distro, post on the distro’s forums. Troubleshooting a piece of software, make an issue on its codeberg/github/gitlab/etc. It makes sense that if you’re having an issue with a specific thing you ask for help on a forum dedicated to that thing. I don’t think it’s a positive that things are becoming centralised onto generalised social media, even for more decentralised federated social media like Lemmy. It just makes support for a given piece of software more spread out and harder to find.
Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
The most annoying thing with that is that you need an account for every little forum that you want to post in. But you are still right.
Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
This might be a hot take, but I hope that we as a platform are toxic enough to advertisers so that big tech’s enshittification and advertising never becomes a problem.
capital@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Twitter still has advertisers.
tea@lemmy.today 5 months ago
As I understand it, Lemmy, being FOSS, is pretty immune to this since there are no big tech shareholders to appease. Lemmy is susceptible to EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) via something like Threads, however.