This is a real concern. Google is already suffering from a marked decline in search result quality in recent months, add this to the mix and it may break the camel's back.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It's going to depend on how content gets indexed.
Doing some quick test searches on Google I think using "site:lemmy.*" gives the best results overall if you don't know which specific community you are trying to search in.
Hopefully lemmy instances get a good search feature that's able to do that. Main issue though is that a lot of communities may not be pulled to your local instance.
Actually, you can already search across several instances, so, I would assume if it's not already a feature, it's coming soon.
people actually did this?
16-years there, I've never considered reddit a good gauge on what the "masses" think. Usually its in its own crazy bubble, most social is but reddit, being an insular community to start with, never really lost that quality.
It can only be seen as the masses with a large grain of salt and extremely colored glasses.
Search the internet in general, expand your search on social to include all social sites google can see. Be sure to educate yourself on how each network usually has its own bias and culture.
There are two distinct things I could want when searching for stuff on [Insert Search Engine Here]:
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Niche "Expert" Opinion: If I am trying to figure out what maple syrup to buy, I am not going to go to someone's advertised maple syrup blog with sponsored posts and a bajillion ads. I am going to go to r/maplesyrup. While they might all be snobby dudes with highly opinionated takes, I at least know it's from people who care enough to be angry about maple syrup on reddit. And most of the time, they give good advice that will point me towards an informed purchase.
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Troubleshooting: Reddit has great troubleshooting threads imo. If I threw my issue into the search engine, and I didnt get a Stack Overflow response, I could add reddit and someone will have at least asked a relevant question before. Sooooooo many of my issues have been assisted in the people asking questions on reddit.
Both of these things I think needs to be replicated elsewhere, especially the Niche "Experts". I would love for my searches to end in "lemmy" or "kbin" or whatever ends up winning, as long as its a federated platform
The troubleshooting can be key, reddit sort of took out a lot of the old forums (or Facebook idk I just know they're disused if existent).
Google's become largely useless in recent years due to SEO spam and autgenerated content. Appending reddit at the end of a query at least helped get some actual responses from human beings
im an RTFM and RTFC fan, never noticed a difference except when id dip into something new for the first time. Feels, and annoying.
It was very useful for queries along the lines of "which x is the best", "which x to buy", etc. You can guarantee that there was a discussion about pretty much anything on Reddit
Bingo. Researching product choices was one of my best use cases for adding site:reddit.com to search queries. Avoids spammy articles and gives you actual discussions with legitimate dissenting opinions.
I found out that by adding reddit to the end of a search i get a solution to most of my problems in top 3 results. If not, I'll usually have to dig trough an AI generated article.
undefined> 16-years there, Iβve never considered reddit a good gauge on what the βmassesβ think. Usually its in its own crazy bubble, most social is but reddit, being an insular community to start with, never really lost that quality.
this is a bit circular...a lot of people on Reddit are young people; they typically do not see things as echo chambers
no, the echo chamber is what the elders (my contemporaries) running the site are doing. its only maintained through direct manipulation of the site and a bot army i suspect is at some level supported by reddit.
They're all in the training data of those LLMs lol
Nice
Quora...seriously though, I dunno. Maybe try page 2+ on google?
sure i could get random individual blog pages giving their own answers, but the magic came from the forum part where sometimes there isn't a singular right answer and you'd have people discussing their preferences based on whatever expertise. Also while there were shills, you could compare to the other answers and see if guy #1 is actually true.
For a lot of the stuff I need to find with Google these (random blog pages) barely exist any more.
I used to be able to find answers down some rabbit hole posted to a forum somewhere, now it's just a chamber of SEO optimisers with no data to be found.
Well you basically have to start on page 2 on Google now because page 1 is nothing but ads.
You might be able to search on one of those sites that archives old Reddit content? Ceddit or similar? I'm not sure if they're still in operation though.
I think the usefulness of forums is going to decline with the rise of the LLMs - like how can you trust the comments about a product are real and not just generated from some LLM? We recently saw GPT bots start to be used heavily on some subreddits and they are much harder to distinguish than previous generations of bots.
We need a Blade Runner.