CNBC - Google execs admit users are 'not quite happy' with search experience after Reddit blackouts

www.cnbc.com Google execs admit users are 'not quite happy' with search experience after Reddit blackouts

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

Plenty Google Search users were appending "site:reddit.com" to their searches to avoid SEO and get actual human answers. This became less useful with the blackouts, and Google is actually addressing it - through a new feature called "Perspectives". Allegedly the feature highlights forums and videos from social media (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora).

This means that those search users won't beeline towards Reddit anymore. Instead there's a reasonable chance that they end in Reddit's competitors, including Youtube (owned by Alphabet, the same parent company as Google Search).

Given that 47% of the traffic of Reddit comes from organic search, this is going to hurt. A lot.

Reddit Migration @kbin.social

Google execs admit users are 'not quite happy' with search experience after Reddit blackouts

www.cnbc.com /2023/06/26/google-execs-hope-new-search-feature-will-help-amid-reddit-blackouts.html

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Technology @lemmy.world

Google execs admit users are ‘not quite happy’ with search experience after Reddit blackouts

www.cnbc.com /2023/06/26/google-execs-hope-new-search-feature-will-help-amid-reddit-blackouts.html

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17 comments

Interesting. I feel like site:reddit became the cheat code for actual answers but it makes sense that it would not be sustainable. Hopefully the reddit drama decentralizes this type of info and makes it more stable.
- It's a bit of off-topic, but what feels weird for me is that I'm probably using search engines in a way that almost nobody does - because not only I don't use this "cheat code", but I've actively uBlacklist'ed reddit from appearing in search. (When I want an answer I want an answer, not a bunch of redditors saying "I dun unrurrstand" or circlejerking.)
  Still, a lot of people do it. For those I hope that the new feature becomes useful.
  
  I had a similar approach for most purposes, though I am too lazy to block sites that way. But I did use to go to Reddit specifically for skincare product reviews, because there are things I like to know before I buy that are not easy to find elsewhere. (And I don't mean honesty, just a few details that aren't necessarily on the label).
  
  Depends on the kind of search. If you're wondering what was newton's second law, you can just Google that. If you're having an issue where your steam deck virtual keyboard is not showing up when you press its shortcut, the top 20 non-reddit Google results will all be random SEO articles about the basic features of steam deck.

This is actually huge. I've used Reddit to SEO boost some of my services and can vouch for how high Google ranks the pages that surface on it. Reddit is gonna bleed and hurt long-term numbers for this.

This is exactly why the Reddit blackout would have been so easy to win if people actually held their ground
- Cory Doctorow talks about this, in How to Leave Dying Social Platforms:
  They had a collective action problem. Each of them could figure out what worked best for them, but getting together to decide what was best for all of them was literally impossible.
  In this case: giving up is the best for you, but holding your ground is the best for everyone. It's a shame, really.

Google should just buy Reddit. They could augment their search with it and would have an awesome basis for their LLM stuff.
- There's nothing they can't get from Reddit for free that they would have to buy though.
  The comments are still open, their search has always used it, heck Reddit even has OAuth with Google, so Google can track Reddit users down to an ID too
  
  Reddit is in the process of closing down their platform. It is very likely that google won’t be able to just crawl their website in the same manner as they did in the past. One of the reasons for the current effort of shutting down the API on Reddits side is that they want to prevent folks from extracting their data. This is what all other social media sites are doing as well. So there is a very high chance that Google won’t have access to it anymore.
  Buying it would guarantee them this access and at the same time prevent their competitors from gaining it. After all Reddit is likely one of the most valuable sources for text based human interaction for training these networks.
  Google also doesn’t care about tracking Reddit users by their ID. That isn’t where the values comes from.

I feel without Reddit Google is often useless
- Do you happen to have any practical example of a search that you performed with the "reddit trick" that returned considerably better results than one without the trick?
  I'm just curious, mind you. I want to understand what I'm doing different from you guys.
  
  I do for sure. For tech questions, forum threads tend to answer my question or lead to more things to dig into, as compared to sponsored or super amateur blogs with confidently give me mediocre or useless answers.

In case you thought Google was doing this for users, you should know that this "Perspectives" thing has been in the works for months, they just thought now was a good time to bring it out. Unlike Reddit, Google has a really good PR team.
- Of course it is not for the users - Alphabet is as malicious as Reddit, perhaps more. It's just that as you said it has a good PR team, so their maliciousness is not so obvious.

17 comments