this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023

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Google is getting a lot worse because of subreddits being private (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1271267

Source

What do you guys think about this? (Wasn't sure which community to post this in)

all 41 comments

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[+] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] DeriHunter 23 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I don't think you understand, we are the ones who are getting fucked. Search results are getting worse and harder for you to find what you need with all the ads, fake news, sponsored sites, ai generated articles, etc.. Google doesn't care if you find high quality results, they will still gett traffic and their money because people won't just stop using it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Google is already an awful search engine and was most useful only for reddit. Search Engine Optimization killed it.

For example, do you know why every recipe Google shows has a 35 page life story article before the recipe? Because it takes you longer to scroll through the page and find the recipe and see if that's what you want. So Google says oh, this website is good and entertaining and full of so many words! This goes higher up! They don't write the stories because the bloggers care. They write stories because it's the only way to get their website seen on Google.

Meanwhile the website you actually want... The one with a simple recipe and no fluff? Well that's not going to sell itself to the Search Engine Optimization. So it's much further down on the list, several pages down.

The same shitification is happening with every website. Every website is a little bit worse than it has to be simply to optimize it's position on the almighty Google.

When you look for the "top shoes for running" or "best phone of 2023", those are just rushed articles with no research done by people with the sole purpose of pumping out millions of articles just to get some spots on Google.

Google was only good for linking to reddit because reddit could never get their search engine working no matter how many times they tried it.

[–] pbmonster 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

because reddit could never get their search engine working no matter how many times they tried it

In their defense, writing a good search engine is very hard, even if you own all the data yourself.

There's a good reason why the litte search bar on reddit, on every forum ever created and on every corporate website is basically useless.

It's also why, among other minor technological challenges (like caching and indexing the entire fediverse), there is no search engine for Lemmy. Nor will there likely ever be one. Which is actually a pitty, because finding valuable information in a comment stashed on some minor instance will be nearly impossible - even for google.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Google absolutely cares if people can't find quality results. They're not the only game in town at this point there are other alternatives. If people can't find what they're looking for they'll look elsewhere.

If you're not opposed to just moving to another big corporation then Bing is better in most ways than Google. Ecosia will give you the same results as Bing but they plant trees for every search. Duck Duck Go is good too

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've been hearing some good things about Kagi so i have been contemplating to try it.

It is subscription based but still;
If there is a service that serves me as a customer to better my experience using a search engine than I'll gladly pay for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I have been a Kagi subscriber for about a year and a half now. It is so much better than Google and DDG and everything else I've tried. It took a while for me to bite the bullet and pay, but now I'm paying for the year up front (for a nice discount, too). I would be very disappointed if I had to use another engine. They've even implemented a few feature requests I've had. That would never happen with Google.

With the rewrite rules, lenses, custom bangs, and domain raising/lowering, I get exactly what I need out of search.

It feels weird to pay at first, but it's a great service.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

There good and sometimes better alternatives to Google, you can easily leave without it or use it only when necessary

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It doesn't solve the issue that the answer you're looking for is on Reddit and isn't accessible anymore...

I mean, good for us for screwing up Reddit, but the transition impacts more than just Reddit itself because subreddits are going private and people are deleting their posts, that's a whole lot of knowledge just disappearing from the internet overnight and that's never a good thing! I don't know how many times I tried to find solutions or answers to tech related questions and the only place I could find an actual answer was on Reddit because it was actual people speaking to each other!

[–] DeriHunter 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, for the short term. But the long term if lemmy can become the successor. It won't be long until it get will get back to normal

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

It took ten years for Reddit to reach that point, that's a whole lot of info that people probably won't talk about again but that might concern some people, just not as many as when the subject was new.

Example, my soundbar has technical issues when plugged in a certain way and that can be solved through some settings on the TV, the only answer I found was on Reddit on a sub that is now locked down. That soundbar isn't for sale anymore and hasn't been for a couple of years, so now I'm have to troubleshoot the issue by myself if I ever unplug it and if I sell it to someone when I upgrade then they're shit out of luck 🤷

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Which one would you personally recommend?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

One long-term solution would be to ask the relevant question in a relevant community on lemmy every time this happens to you. Then answer it yourself (or wait for other to), perhaps using the other site (via archive.org) as a reference when writing it up.

The important bit is to make sure the answer here is complete and not just a link to outside sources. That way it won't disappear if those other sites go offline.

With enough people doing this we can push lemmy into those search results and build a useful & independent repository of knowledge.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Please post LINKS to Lemmy, not screenshots of headlines. Ffs, even your "source" link goes to an image, not the article

Mods, can we please crack down on this dumb-ification of Lemmy? We're better than tiktok.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Not just with subs going private, but with users purging their comments and posts along with their accounts. Just last night I was talking to a friend about something and wanted to pull up a post from a while back. Lo and behold, deleted and gone.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

all attention to this mess is good imho. also remember chat gpt was trained on reddit data i until fall 2021 so should be able to pull on archived zeitgeist for a quick and dirty answer

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I wonder if they could shift to showing cached versions of pages, so that data is still accessible externally, but you can't interact or get to it from reddit.

[–] ghariksforge 3 points 2 years ago

Reddit was one of the last places on the internet where you could read content without logging in. Almost all of the internet is Dark Web now, inaccessible unless you log in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's temporary until useful info gets posted elsewhere. Besides, Reddit wasn't the only place for good info.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

It was a terrible place to get info. Most answers were either deleted, someone showing off about the topic but not actually answering the question or OP saying "never mind, I figured it out" and riding off into the sunset.