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?

    • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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

          • 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.

  • 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.

  • ward2k@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error

    It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google

    • Aetina@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.

    • ahbi_santini@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.

      It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers

  • static@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It would be cheaper for google to just buy reddit, remove the adds and open the api’s again.

    Having relevent search results is priceless.

  • shiftenter@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you’d eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I’m grateful.

    • MrGG@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’ve noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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

  • ???@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google’s retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn’t satisfy it’s ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.

      • ???@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.

        Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match… They don’t fucking work anymore.

  • sacredbirdman@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there’s so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that’s why they don’t see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on… So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far… and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they’ve been worse than competitors for years.

  • 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