Google Says the Reddit Blackout Made Search Worse

gizmodo.com Google Says the Reddit Blackout Made Search Worse

A senior Google VP said earlier this month that Google users who couldn't add "Reddit" to their queries were “not quite happy” following the protest.

18 comments

Yeah... that is pretty much the point of a protest. It is certainly not supposed to make people's lives more convenient, and if convenience is unchanged then it means people probably don't know you're there.

Weaponized inconvenience is a powerful thing.
If lemmy becomes as big as reddit will there be a workaround in place for this? Googling something without appending 'site:reddit.com' to the end is just worthless these days. I'm googling a lot less now. Will just adding 'lemmy' be enough without specifying a site?
- Checkout the conversation here: https://lemmy.world/post/670532. This topic keeps coming up, so I'm hoping the solution I'm working on can resolve this exact issue.
- We've got a LONG way to go before any site gets as big as Reddit. I'm just hoping between the fediverse and/or squabbles one of those will "win" enough to get a critical mass of users. I'm actually very happy with both, there is just not even a fraction of content compared to reddit in an hour (understandably so).
  
  That should not be the goal.
  
  Have we learned nothing?
  
  To be fair, the point of the fediverse is that despite them being different platforms, they can all communicate with each other seamlessly. Mastodon users can see and comment on this thread for example without ever leaving Mastodon. They can even make their own posts on lemmy without leaving Mastodon. So it really isn't necessary for a single platform to gain enough critical mass to overtake Reddit. Even on a singular platform it's technically made up of many different individually hosted sites that we call instances. So even if lemmy were to have more users than Reddit one day, it's an arbitrary place to draw the line. Why not claim that a single instance has to reach that critical mass instead?
- It will work with any bigger instance because of federation. All communities with subscribers from an instance are available on that instance. Si site:lemmy.world, site:programming.dev, etc. will work.
- There's nothing stopping google from indexing the fediverse. Arguably it's easier than indexing webpages.
It's their own damn fault for letting the algorithm have spammy/fake websites ride to the top of the search while legit sites are on the bottom. If you look for a product you get a full page or 2 of "bestVacuum.com" type of sites that are just paid sites pretending that they are reviewers.

If you are having issues with removed/blocked reddit solution you can check the cache in the google search but some sections don't have them.
- The problem is that Lemmy is not immune to this. Even Reddit was vulnerable, just not in the traditional ways.
  
  If Lemmy grows to that level, we will 100% have a problem with SEO bots, fake reviews, etc. We are already seeing a problem with a particularly toxic instance, instances hosting potentially and widely illegal content, along with enormous and problematic walled gardens. (Names withheld because that's not the point here)
  
  I can only hope that as the codebase and community mature, we can address these issues before they become catastrophic.
This is what we get for letting Reddit become the default centralized resource for, well, everything.

It takes effort to host, moderate, and organize, but communities should make efforts to publish wikis with their valuable resources and information.
Well, hopefully it means that there's high-level attention at Google to providing an easy way to search the Fediverse and the like, if they're aware of the importance of searching forum systems.
Really more of an indictment of Google than on Reddit in this one. Google needs to change their search again so shitty SEO doesn't make it through the top results, and instead have more genuine results be at the top.
Which goes to show how useless google is without the millions of people it profits from to generate content for it's advertising business
- How easy of a time would you have using the web without a search engine? Do you feel the same way about Duckduckgo?
  
  I use DDG as my primary, and my general feeling is that I don't mind some advertising to make money, but Google is objectively bad these days. At the time I started using DDG, Google was still probably the better choice in terms of search results. These days, DDG is competitive, but more importantly, I don't have to scroll past half a page of ads masquerading as results.

18 comments