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

I just checked the perspectives tab, since I’m on mobile. I guess Google wants people to be less reliant on Reddit, but it’s like… User-generated content on Reddit vs. Twitter/Tiktok/Youtube are not the same? Usually I put “reddit” in the search bc I want a quick and well-informed text-based answer to something. That’s still going to be the easiest thing to do.

It's shocking to see how bad they've become at what used to be their core function. I mean their brand name became the verb for looking something up on the internet. Now it just returns a useless mix of advertising, blogspam, AI spam, and sometimes-useful reddit results.

I'm also not quite happy with the search experience due to them constantly moving UI components around randomly. First they started shuffling around the order of the search tabs (All, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) erratically, and now they've also decided to also start including what they believe may be related search terms there as well, sometimes.

"Another employee question in the companywide meeting asked if Google can more easily surface “authentic discussion” since the “Reddit blackout” was making it harder to find such content.

CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in to to say that users don’t want “blue links” as much as they want “more comprehensive answers.”

No I'm pretty sure people really are looking for authentic discussion, twisting that to say that we want more comprehensive answers is clearly Pichai trying to make the situation fit what he already wants to do: implement generative AI in response to searches to keep people on the site.

To get a genuine opinion on “what is the best [whatever]” is an impossibility now with result after result of Amazon affiliate lists of utter garbage.

Try to compare 2 pieces of computer hardware and be faced with results from UserShitMark or other affiliate laden shitbags.

Google Search is ruined with all the inorganic shit it gravitates to.

Google would probably like to take over the user generated content somehow. If people can find it on Google even when it is not available on Reddit then it is pure profit for Google. They already provide a lot of information on their search pages bypassing the sources. Google is not our friend. Not any more.

Yeah, this is something I thought about as soon as the blackout started. I am in the IT world and as soon as it happened, it got really difficult to find certain bits of crucial information, because those bits of info were stored within Reddit comments.

Anyone in the tech world can tell you that besides Stack Overflow and Github, Reddit is right up there among the most leaned-on tech resources these days. Never before was there a bigger forum of tech people discussing their work. Those results were suddenly, instantly no longer valid, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who noticed that. This is part of why Reddit was scrambling to open subs back up - if more than 2 or 3 weeks went by, Google would have removed those listings from the search.

That was probably the only good thing reddid offered, google searches.
Whenever I had a tech related issue I added reddit at the end and I knew I'll find the solution instead of going through MS and other official sites who for some reason had the thread as solved but no solution to be found.