Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    It’s going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.

    Google’s got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now…can’t find shit. And it’s about half its own fault.

    I’ll put right around half of the blame on “platformization.” Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn’t get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what’s there. Twitter is slightly more open…but not really.

    The other half of the problem is Google’s own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.

    That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they’ve gotten in the habit of appending “reddit” to google search strings because a. that’s where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit’s own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn’t work so well.

    So what are we keeping them around for?

    • mioko@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don’t feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.

      • refugeered@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.

        https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.

        https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.

        But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.

      • itsJoelleScott@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ecosia has been pretty okay for me. Additionally, they are a non-profit that plants trees based off user usage.

      • httpjames@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Kagi is a premium search engine that aims to have the highest quality search results. They use algorithms to surface up more indie content, like blogs, and downrank tracker-heavy pages and blog/SEO spam. The difference between Kagi and Google is night and day.

        • SMT42@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Not sure i like metered searches… and $25/month seems steep for unlimited.

          But i will try this out, i would gladly pay for actually good search. Maybe keep google for simple web navigation then the $5 tier kagi for more nuanced search, should keep under the 300 search limit with that approach

          • alejandro@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I use Kagi and never pay more than $10/mo even though I use it a lot. I think most people don’t know how much they search in a month, so the pricing can be confusing.

            I have the early adopter pro plan, which gives me extra searches (1500 instead of 1000), but for reference, I averaged 1044 searches/mo over the past 6 months (not counting this month). So if I had the standard pro plan, I’d have paid $10.66 per month on average.

            The unlimited plan seems excessive to me, unless you’re playing with the API or something like that.

    • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven’t used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I’m going to a specialized information website, for buying things I’m looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I’ve grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I’m having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.

  • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I’ll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.

    • Domriso@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn’t restore your comments? They’ve been doing that to a bunch of people.

  • cmrn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.

    If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…

    • kat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.

  • Gentoo1337@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Of course they are. Adding “Reddit” at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).

    • meiti@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.

      • Trevader24135@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It depends what you were searching for. For help with Stable Diffusion or programming questions or other technical subjects, the reddit communities were actually one of the best places I could go to for answers

  • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I didn’t realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It’s just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.

    • achensherd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.

      • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        What’s even more annoying than google populating half the first page with ads is that the links don’t even work half the time these days.

    • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it’s safe to assume chat GPT’s training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.

        • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Fuuuuuuck… Imagine if chat GPT started amending its results with… “EDIT: wElL tHiS bLeW uP oVeRnIgHt… tHaNkS fOr ThE gOlD kInD ReDdiToR”

          That’d be so damn annoying haha

  • cpt_kierk@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.

    In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we’ve built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn’t, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add “site:reddit.com” to the query. But if the niche communities die, that’s a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.

      So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit’s own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won’t realise this.

      • impulse@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.

        My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.

        Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.

        • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Keep checking, see what happens

          Although I suspect edits are less likely to be restored than edits+deletions, or even edits alone.

          Certainly, I’ve had a couple comments that I manually edited that have stayed, while a few others have popped back up.

          But so far, comments that I have edited and deleted from the source URL have stayed down. It’s only the edits from the profile (using PowerDeleteSuite) where some have come back. Granted, most were old, now I’m getting info the recent ones they’ve been lingering on.

          I still have a good 28,000 out of 76,000 lines to get through though from my original CSV file. I will make sure they’re all processed before 1 July, and if reddit restores any of them I’ll have logs to show their violation.

    • Ziro@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I’m new) smacks of the “old Internet.” I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.

  • Kethal@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Google Perspectives will highlight results from Quora? That’s the last thing I want.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For real. Looks like speedrunning digging one owns grave is becoming hella popular in silicon valley as of late. Everyone wants to set a new record.

    • chris2112@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Dear God, i hope that’s not true. Quora answer quality is probably worse than Yahoo answers; at least those were just shit posts, 90% of Quora answers are ads by the creator of some project in my experience

  • Favrion@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That was one of the first things that I thought about. People can’t affix “Reddit” to their Google searches in good faith anymore, so what is the next most reliable community?

  • Tenthrow@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.

    • drphungky@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on “the best impact hammer” or “how to buy solar panels” without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

      The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.

      • Eidolon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        undefined> I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.

        Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we’re ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we’ll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.

          • csm10495@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I’m sure it’s a people circle thing.

            It’s way too easy to use Twitter and complain… it’s way to easy to use reddit … (if you use their app) and complain.

            I don’t think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.

            Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I’ve gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse… so would I get that experience here ever? Idk… but it’s a minus for me.

            Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don’t see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.

            • 🦥󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’d prefer if all those companies just stay on Twitter and leave Lemmy/Mastadon alone. Their influence is what got the internet into the mess that it’s currently in.

          • Eidolon@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

            • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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              1 year ago

              Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.

              You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.

              I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.

              • goetzit@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?

                • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
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                  1 year ago

                  You’d have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you’d be able to tease out any bias that exists.

        • Hopps@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.

          Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it’s an okay vid.

          • SSTF@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My understanding is plugin is alright (I have it too), but it’s increasingly inaccurate, especially for videos uploaded after it was created. I believe it took data from YouTube before the dislikes were removed and uses that as a snapshot, then adds the thumbs up/down of users of the plugin and uses that to extrapolate trends from the very limited data it has coming in.

            The real solution would be YouTube showing the scores again, but I guess their stupid corporate videos getting BTFO was too much for them.

            • Hopps@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The plugin you are mentioning is based on dislikes and yes it is very inaccurate. The one I mentioned works off of the ratio between the likes vs the view count so the accuracy is always there, it’s a different way of going about it.

              I agree that YouTube just needs to bring the dislike count back, it’s a pain trying to find these alternative ways to know if a video is good when the data is there. It’s so greedy of them, outright harming user experience for profit.

  • TrickyCamel@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Whats bothering me the most about it is that Reddit is still a valuable source of information for so many things, can’t get around a boss fight in a certain older videogame? Yep, there are about 10 threads about it on reddit from years ago.

    The amount information on there is big enough that often times many of the top useful search results are in reddit, I hope Lemmy can fill the gap, at least partially but I’m aware that it could years and that’s only if the fediverse picks up well enough.

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

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    • InFerNo@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      A few weeks ago, when things started to get heated, I had the reflex of copying all the helpful posts I made amd putting them on my own knowledge base in case something goes wrong with reddit. I can always put them somewhere since I’ve secured that info on my own server.

  • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    It’s really frustrating how much blatantly AI-written shit is at the top of every Google search nowadays.

    Like, you Google “how to install a door” and you find an article that’s like

    “Here’s how you install a door. Installing a door is really easy when you know how This guide will tell you how to install a door on ten easy steps. The first step in installing your door is to pick a door at the store.” It repeats the title of the article everyother damn sentence, and takes FOREVER to get to a useful point. And sometimes they give flat out incorrect advice.

    Then, you check the urland it’s something like “techbuiz.com” and you’ve never even heard of this shit before, why the hellisit the top indexed result?

    This isn’t a problem to do with the reddit blackout at all, it’s the enshittification of Google algorithm. They sell those top slots to the highest bidder, it’s no longer about who actually has relevant information about the thing you searched for, it’s about who had just enough matching keywords AND gave Google money to put up top.

    Of course Google blames other sites, like reddit. It makes up all kinds of bullshit to obfuscate what they are doing, and sin e they have a proprietary algorithm nobody can prove that they are doing what I described above. But it’s so blatantly obvious that they are that it’s nearly insulting that they keep pretending they aren’t.

    • Something_Complex@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They denied that shit?? Also I sometimes insult Google. Usually with a sentence like:

      Where to find a moose in RDR2. (Google doesn’t give a decent answer and I don’t want to use Reddit no more).

      So my next question is the same:

      Where to find a moose in RDR2…Cmn Google, you where the platform of a generation. Stop selling out you piece of shit and give me the results I want for fuck sake…

      For some reason that works I swear

  • MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.

    • swan_pr@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol

  • CliveRosfield@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The natural degredation of google just comes down to the incredibly stupid levels of search engine optimization and ads. Most articles in particular are so terrible, I’m convinced a lot of them are just written by bots. What I want are answers actually written by humans on discussion boards with a rating system. That’s what made me add “reddit” to the end of everything. Genuine humans, NOT people being paid to write articles or ads.

    • NMSGalacticHub@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not necessarily by bots, but a lot of product-related articles - say, “What’s the best washing machine?” or “What’s the best hot wire cutter?” or anything like that - will have multiple near-identical articles across multiple websites with links for each product generating a kickback for the author. Whereas Reddit was just people talking.

      Articles like that are probably starting to be written by AI for sure though. You could write an article on every type of product that way, and get kickbacks from all of them, all while depriving people of actual useful info. Woo, innovation!