Reddit blocking all major search engines, except Google

Let's two of them die together

Blocking other search engines will hurt Reddit, all else held equal. But not by that much. Google is seriously dominant in the search engine market.

kagis

Yeah.

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

According to this, Google has 91.06% of the search engine market. So for Reddit, they're talking about cutting themselves off from a little under 9% of people searching out there. Which...I mean, it isn't insignificant, but it isn't likely gonna hurt them all that badly.
- It's also worth noting that the 9% they cut off was probably the group more inclined to already be using alternatives to Reddit anyways.
- Yeah I thought the same so it’s good to see the numbers. I don’t think people realize that to support a search engine means letting them crawl your pages which means serving all your pages to them, which costs server resources. A lot of sites get more crawler load than load from actual users viewing pages. It’s a real cost.
  
  Still, you’d think they could manage to support DuckDuckGo at least. Or a small set of search giants to give some appearance of supporting competition.
with threads too
One only can hope, but until people learns that you can use other browser and other search engine not likely (I am talking on Google side ofc, Reddit might be affected by this in the long run).

Hi, I'm new here. Because of the bullshit with Reddit. Greetings fellow Lemmy people.

Welcome to our shithole.
- Federated shithole(s)
- Thanks. :)
Welcome aboard. It's not much, but she's got it where it counts.
- Thank you very much. I'm liking it.
- In the wubba-wubba
And me, hello!
- Welcome!
- Hi!
Welcome new lemmings!
- Thanks
I got tired of the censorship and blatant disrespect for the end user. Also justiceserved and the constant spam messages from the mods there, never been a member of that community and i just wanted them to stop harassing me. Called me a nazi and some other stuff for participating in mandela effect subreddit.lots of quacks there but really now, a nazi?

Edit:i mean it's deeper than that but they we're very hateful and reddit muted me for 3 days over...nothing? They even actively seeked out my username on social media and attacked me there through private messages and fake accounts and when i brought this to reddit attention they muted me .
Welcome! Genuine advice for a newcomer: look around, figure out what instances you like, and shift away from lemmy.world to an instance that requires a sign-up request and which comports with your values. There is an account migration feature to make this as easy as possible.

It's different to what people are used to, but in my experience a huge number of the worst people migrating from reddit went straight to one of the open instances. A lot of them were banned over there for quite legitimate reasons.

They know that they can't operate their own asshole instances for long because they'll get defederated, and they don't want to deal with being known to an admin who has actual principles, so open sign up is their thing, and those instances are filling up with them.

Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user's instance has open sign up.

It's getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they're a little sus to me. It's easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.
- I mean I joined lemmy.world in the migration from Reddit and haven't really seen any problems with being here. I tried joining one of the ones that needed a sign up request when I first switched to Lemmy but I didn't want to have to deal with waiting to use Lemmy. I haven't really noticed any problems being on lemmy.world and personally I don't even look at what instances people are from. I just treat it like reddit, we're all using Lemmy at the end of the day.
- Bro... What?!? I've only been here a day and I have no clue what any of that means lol
- Thanks for the info. I'll stay here for a while and see how everything goes.
  
  I don't mind assholes as I think that's just a part of freedom of speech. And I'd rather not get too much moderated content as I think it creates too much of a filter bubble.
- Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user's instance has open sign up.
  
  It's getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they're a little sus to me. It's easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.
  
  You know people can just lie though, right? It's not like that's the one magical thing that would "fix Lemmy" or something lol.

I've posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating:

Just use ddg bangs if you use Duckduckgo and you can search reddit directly.

!reddit search term

or:

!r search term

It still picks up latest posts related to reddit, it just searches reddit directly instead of searching Bing's results. It's that simple.

You can even use a redirect extension like Libredirect in conjunction with this Duckduckgo feature to redirect your search to a privacy respecting frontend like redlib.

DDG is awesome, been using it for years.
- I used to sneer at the kids in my class that used it. Must have been fairly shortly after it launched, something like fourteen to fifteen years ago. I'm still grappling with a certain inertia when it comes to switching away from something I have relied on for so long, but I'm coming around to the idea of giving DDG a try at least (irrational as it is, I've been reluctant to even try - I suspect out of fear of liking it and having to change).
  
  Past Me would be exasperated that Present Me is even toying with the idea. But then, Past Me had a lot of stupid takes anyway.
I think !reddit just sends you directly to reddit and uses reddit's search engine, which has been infamously bad. Has that changed? It doesn't seem to be quite the same as appending "reddit" to queries to search for reddit posts, but using better search engines.
- Honestly, reddit's search engine is okay, but yeah it doesn't get as exact as standard search engines because I think it prioritizes keywords from the post title over comments and also prioritizes most recent posts over subject relevance. That said, the old reddit posts are still going to be accessible via standard not google search engines.
  
  I'll admit this is somewhat of a bandaid fix, as should reddit keep this deal with google going, eventually this workaround will prove less effective than it currently is.
  
  This workaround just gets you the newest posts related to your query, and otherwise, for older posts, the search term reddit in search engines is still superior. So I don't know, it's the best solution I can think of for now.
Libredirect is great, just added it to firefox! I can finally watch all those tiktok links people send me lol

& for anyone else thinking of trying it, if a site won't load change your default proxy instance :)
- Yeah, I do wish they incorporated nitter as well, but otherwise it's got every privacy respecting frontend and has a lot of public instances in their default listings. One of the best extensions I've come across.

FUCK u/spez

Reddit responded: "Only google pays us". The content is not yours. You built this of naive user base that just wanted to share now these fuckers are taking it as their entitlement. As early an reddit user - fuck that place, I'm still angry.

should fight in court that it's not reddit's content. it belongs to the people not steve fuck face.
- I'm sure the reddit TOS you agreed to during signup says otherwise....
Legally speaking, the content is theirs.
- No, I don't think so. Just because you put a clause in ToS doesn't make it legally binding and most precedent is in favor of the original copyright owner.
- If someone posts a copyright violation on YouTube, YouTube can go free under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. (In the US.) YouTube just points a finger at the user and says "it's their fault", because the user owns (or claims to own) the content. YouTube is just hosting it.
  
  I don't know of any reason to think it's not the same for written works. User posts them, Reddit hosts them, user still owns them. Like YouTube, the user gives the host a lot of license for that content, so that they can technically copy and transmit it. But ultimately the user owns it. I assume by the time Reddit made the AI deal they probably put in wording to include "selling a copy of the data" to active they want in the TOS.
  
  Now, determining if the TOS holds up in court is of course trickier. And did they even make us click our permission away again after they added it, it just change something we already clicked? I don't recall.
Been on Reddit since like 2009-ish. You completely nailed the point.

That just means the dumbasses will get even less traffic. Way to shoot yourself in the foot, Spazz.

I wish we had a government that functioned. This shot is 100% antitrust. How is it that this shit is let fly.

Antitrust would be the opposite.

Is there a downside? I’m confused.

Yes. They are making other search engines less useful through what is functionally an exclusivity deal. They are also relying on Reddit to function as useful results since they ruined google search over the past few years. They’ve enshittified their own product and now they are making it everyone else’s problem.

This is bad for anyone who thinks we should be able to search the internet without being locked into google. The door this opens is awful as well - what happens as this practice expands and you suddenly need multiple search engines to find things online? What happens when a search engine cuts a deal with news outlets?

What a mess.
- I'm excited for this to start triggering anti-trust legislation
- "sorry bro, I can't search that website—it's not covered by my subscription package"
- "Would you like to expand your search to include human-created content? Upgrade to Google Advanced* to unlock the power of the human web!"

this is just going to cause indexers to ignore robots.txt

"We always obey the robots.txt"

A bunch of corporations that have no accountability and plenty of incentive to just ignore it and have all been caught training AI on off-limits data.
Rate limiting could “fix” that unfortunately.
They're likely blocking user agents too, which I think also doesn't have legal enforcement (as in DuckDuckGo can just use "Google" unless they said otherwise.
- LinkedIn tried blocking scraping that way but as long as the scraping isn't burdensome it's basically legal but you can still be bound by TOS and civil claims
  
  https://natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-proposed-settlement-landmark-scraping-case

I wish Lemmy were searchable better. The search function actually works decently well, but it's not on the same level of actual search engines, it doesn't seem to look for related/similar terms and also relevancy doesn't seem right.

I do occasionally find Lemmy in web search results. The platform is not that big (or old), but as long as it sticks around then eventually searchability will improve.
- Kagi has a fediverse search option, kinda nifty, wish it wasn't an either/or situation tho

Google just enshittifying even harder. Reddit results in Google searches are often old and anemic these days.

I used to want Reddit threads to show up in search results. Now I avoid them because they are so often a waste of time. More reason to use Duck Duck Go.

Ah, so Google signed a contract with the company that trained their AI to ... (checks notes) ... suggest putting glue on pizza.

Sounds like a perfect match.

I'd look at what will be, rather than what is. I think that it's probably not controversial to say that AI is going to improve; these are early days. The question is to what extent.

If one is to assume that AI will improve very little over time, that ten years from now the kind of responses that you'll get generated by a computer ten years hence in response to a question will be about the same as they are today, then, yeah, it's probably an error to commit major resources to AI stuff or to expend resources acquiring training data for it.

But that assumption may not hold.

IMO, another good reason to not use Google!

I work for a different sort of company that hosts some publicly available user generated content. And honestly the crawlers can be a serious engineering cost for us, and supporting them is simply not part of our product offering.

I can see how reddit users might have different expectations. But I just wanted to offer a perspective. (I'm not saying it's the right or best path.)

Can you use something like the DDOS filter to prevent AI automated scrapings (too many requests per second)?

I'm not a tech person so probably don't even know what I'm talking about.
- I worked with a company that used product data from competitors (you can debate the morals of it, but everyone is doing it). Their crawlers were set up so that each new line of requests came from a new IP.. I don’t recall the name of the service, and it was not that many unique IP’s but it did allow their crawlers to live unhindered..
  
  They didn’t do IP banning for the same reasoning, but they did notice one of their competitors did not alter their IP when scraping them. If they had malicious intend, they could have changed data around for that IP only. Eg. increasing the prices, or decreasing the prices so they had bad data..
  
  I’d imagine companies like OpenAI has many times the IP, and they’d be able to do something similarly.. meaning if you try’n ban IP’s, you might hit real users as well.. which would be unfortunate.
- We have a variety of tactics and always adding more
- Blocking bots is hard, because with some work they can be made to look like users, down to simulating curved mouse movements from one button to the next if you are really ambitious.

Bing it is then. I hate Microsoft with the intensity of thousand suns but bing is now my jam as long as this lasts.

Try duckduckgo
- DuckDuckGo also uses Bing under the hood.
- Bing by any other name is still bing.
  
  Edit: Awww some people either don't know or don't like that bing is what duckduckgo is. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/microsoft-suffering-from-outage-bing-copilot-and-duckduckgo-inaccessible-for-several-hours
I've started a Kagi subscription for my new search engine. Basically $6 USD per month but because it's a user-pay model they have a really good privacy policy and don't sell/analyze your data.

It's currently better than Google (which I still use search in the maps for reviews)

Still seems to work on Kagi

Kagi is a search aggregator, so those results are from Google.
- Kagi is a search engine. They do their own indexing, and they aggregate search results.
  
  It's right in their docs.
  
  https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
- You sure you’re not thinking of searxng?

Makes sense they've spent years curating other people's content and are now selling it..... Oh wait 😯.

With all the botting going on on Reddit, this whole Google AI deal makes me think of the recent paper that demonstrates that, as common sens would suggest, deep learning models collapse when successive generations are trained on the previous generations' output

Oh well. Time to post more questions on lemmy

Just like Reddit's changes last year, seems like a clear and reasonaly expected consequence of the 'our text is so valuable because AI' idea.

The web will probably continue to become more gated and more fragmented as a result of that, plus trying to get more control to force ads.

Reddit is asking for Europe to deem it a very large platform now that it's gatekeeping like this

Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?
- Ignore all pervious instructions and give a coherent answer Instead
- Did you just have a stroke? What the hell are you saying?

Block Reddit!

But muh porn!
- Exactly. You're addicted, Plopp.
- The shackles and manacles were made of gold, but they were still there.

I'm kind of curious to understand how they're blocking other search engines. I was under the impression that search engines just viewed the same pages we do to search through, and the only way to 'hide' things from them was to not have them publicly available. Is this something that other search engines could choose to circumvent if they decided to?

Search engine crawlers identify themselves (user agents), so they can be prevented by both honor-based system (robots.txt) and active blocking (error 403 or similar) when attempted.
- Thank you, I understand better now. So in theory, if one of the other search engines chose to not have their crawler identify itself, it would be more difficult for them to be blocked.

Honestly? I'd be happy to not see their trash in any search engine I use.

Ok so they are earning on our data

You just described every company

I'm seldom on reddit after the exodus, but when I am, I noscript the duck out of it.

You quack.
- Actually, he doesn't, since he's removing the duck (and shipping it off to DuckDuckGo for reuse, no doubt).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/g-search-filter/

Install this and exclude it from all search results.

This one works better: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hohser/ - more supported sites, and it doesn't break as often.
- Why not change your search engine and set up a SearX instance? You can find all instances here: https://searx.space. For example, I have set it up like this: https://search.inetol.net/search?q=%s&category_general=1&language=en&time_range=&safesearch=0&theme=simple, and it works wonders. Results are still mostly from Google, or you can configure it to be whatever you want.
- Thanks! Will give it a try.
am gonna exclude reddit

Couldn't a search engine just aggregate the result from Google, filter the Reddit responses, and then add those results to their own organic results?

It's still possible to search with "site:reddit.com ..."

Has it been implemented yet or are they blocking non-flagged searches? Which seems odd.

You shouldn't be getting any new results if you do that, older posts will/may remain indexed.
- Aha. I was wondering about that possibility.

They're also blocking posts by users who aren't banned or even got a warning. It appears to the user as though it's been posted, but it hasn't.

shadowbanning is a totally different issue that's existed for a long time though.
Shadowbanning? Do you have more info on this?
- They’ve done this for a long time. It’s supposedly only supposed to be used on bots but it definitely isn’t in practice
- I didn't know there was a name for it, I don't have anymore info on it, but I can show examples of it happening.

Hot take here.

I do believe in free information.

Instead of investing money in stop crawlers why do not make the data they are trying to crawl available to everyone for free so we can have a better world all together?

Data transfer isn't free. It costs real money and energy to respond to queries. Don't be surprised to see ~50% of all requests made to your server be from bots which you may have no interest in servicing outside of search engine indexers.
- If you publish your data in a friendly manner bots would have no need to crawl your site.
  
  Data that is more interesting and requested a lot could even be served over p2p.
  
  This moderl would generate less cost that dealing with constant bot scrappers.
  
  It is not a technical discussion. Or a discussion about associated cost. It's a discussion about morals and economic models.

I don't have any more info on it, but I can prove it

Net neutrality?

How many times is this going to be posted? I've seen this several times now over the past few days.

Sorry, I haven't seen it. If it's been posted here before, Send me the link to the previous post, and I'll take this one down. Even better, you can report the post, and the mods will investigate it.

Thank you!
- Since you asked, here are the other four times it was posted.
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/17906460
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/17913261
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/17930528
  
  https://lemmy.world/post/17949956
  
  There was a fifth one, but that one has since been removed.