this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

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[–] snek 71 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] electriccars 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I literally couldn't find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.

[–] snek 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rDrDr 4 points 1 year ago

You can add date restrictions in Google search. Very helpful.

[–] kadu 8 points 1 year ago

Google heavily prioritizes .com, .org and other similar "popular" top level domains.

.world, . travel and similar ones are heavily penalized in Google's ranking for search results.

[–] nucleative 7 points 1 year ago

I can see it on the localized version of Google where I'm at.

[–] Sterben 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)

[–] snek 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).

Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn't significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.

[–] Zeus 9 points 1 year ago

i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling "how to x site:reddit.com", we'll just fedisearch "how to x"

in fact, i'm pretty sure i already found one but it wasn't very good, and i've forgotten it's name

[–] Sterben 3 points 1 year ago

I ditched Google years ago. Lemmy is still in very early stage of development, so things will change most likely.