World News @beehaw.org BrikoX @vlemmy.net 2y ago

Protests broke Reddit hack for useful Google search results—and Google knows it

arstechnica.com Protests broke Reddit hack for useful Google search results—and Google knows it

Search term + Reddit = John Oliver?

cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/317922

Alternate title: Google admits Reddit protests make it harder to find helpful search results

Reddit Migration @kbin.social Temperche @feddit.de 2y ago

Protests broke Reddit hack for useful Google search results—and Google knows it

arstechnica.com /gadgets/2023/06/google-admits-reddit-protests-make-it-harder-to-find-helpful-search-results/

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41 comments

Search engines have been becoming increasingly useless for years at this point as SEO gentrification runs rampant and more content moves behind walled gardens like Discord and anything that requires a subscription. Not to mention that Google enshittifies just like everything else. The amount of overly verbose garbage I have to trek through just to not get an answer to my query is far too high. God fucking help us now that AI can generate content, which will be even more garbage to sift through.
- You know, that was a good article until the author took a completely unnecessary and irrelevant swipe at Biden; at which point I completely lost interest in anything the author had to say.
  
  I'm really fucking tired of political bullshit being embedded into every-goddamned-thing I read.
  
  Thank goodness someone is here to defend the reactionary fuck who was literally creating a Disinformation Governance Board as part of the ever-expanding police state and its fascist DHS organization. /s
- When Google first started making a name for itself, it actually returned links to shit where the content literally had the search terms in the visible text. Ah, the good ol' days before the fuckin' search engine decided it was smarter than its users.
  
  Sometimes it just straight up ignores my search modifiers to send me shit. I know the tech illiterate need their hands held, but bruh.
- Agree. I also feel like the monetization behind use of Google tools, user information, etc just further complicates it.
  
  I think back on when the internet was first getting started and how everyone was so excited by the prospect of have an essentially "living library" at their fingertips, full of potential to share information and learn in what was perceived by many to be a more open source type model --- initially. It didn't take long to see it succumb to all the same practices that have plagued free exchange of ideas in the real world since forever.
  
  Add to this the stand by the "free press" of the world, which is no longer free, bent as they are with guarding information access behind paywalls since they continue to decry loss of paper readership and revenue from it as the reason for doing this; that may be true in part but it's only a fraction of the issues at stake.
  
  I remember using the internet before smartphones were ubiquitous. At the time, I was thinking that we would be entering a period of unprecedented enlightenment with all the easy access to all the information a person could want. Lol. Lmao.
- We need the AI to sift through the garbage, so we don’t have to
  
  It feels like AI wrote it already. Try googling a windows error now. Instead of getting forums or a blog you get 10 shitty websites with lists of generic fixes that end with them recommending their shitty software that will absolutely not fix your issue.
I can't trust a single thing that pops up on google because everything is auto generated blog spam

And regarding reddit, moderation keeps reddit at a good quality but if reddit takes away moderators tools and introduces more instructive ads it will become low quality and untrustworthy as well
- You've got a typo. I assume you mean intrusive ads.
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan reportedly said.

Their search has been getting worse and worse for a long time before the Reddit protest.
- Ironically, reddit's search feature was also trash. If I wanted to find something on reddit I just went to google and appended "reddit".
  
  IIRC, they cited google as a reason not to work on their own search, since that's what most of their userbase had got used to searching reddit with anyway by that point.
- "Many of us may wonder," yep. Some of us are pretty sure it's because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They're very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.
  
  You know, that makes me wonder if someone could figure out the old google search algorithm, and use it to make a new, more useful search engine.
  
  I recently googled "grass" to find out more about different species and the results were all trying to sell me grass.
  
  Grass.
  
  Where I live it's as common as dirt. I wonder how many people Google the word "grass" with zero qualifiers when trying to BUY grass.
  
  Ffs
Google as a search engine is more or less dead. I was only really using Google to search reddit. Now that I'm done with reddit... There goes Google.
- Google removing the "do no evil" from their ethos was a very clear indication of the direction they were heading.
  
  "Don't be evil" is still in Google's Code of Conduct, it's just been at the end of the document rather than the start since 2018.
  
  Google did evil shit before and after the change, it's not quite the big deal that some people make it out to be!
- What's your preferred alternative? I use DuckDuckGo, and it's... OK. I still often switch over to Google when I'm having a hard time finding relevant results on DDG.
  
  SearXNG. It's a meta-search aggregator, you can use any public instance (the config is all in-browser) or host your own for kind of extra privacy.
  
  Presearch
  
  It seems to depend on the type of search. For ordinary information, I'm using DuckDuckGo. For shopping, I go to Google, but the results aren't great. I'm undecided for serious research.
- What are you using now?
  
  DuckDuckGo
The article starts with absolute non-news: To get results on reddit.com you should addd site:reddit.com to your search, not just Reddit.

Unfortunately, I think this is a disadvantage of the Fediverse when it comes to search: The "site:" operator won't work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.

Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search. E.g. DIY Esp8266 camera activator scope:fediverse, scope:lemmy or maybe scope:diaspora
- I never bothered with that. All my results were from reddit.com anyway with just appending reddit to the end. Even Bing chat would add reddit to the end of search for you without asking.
- he “site:” operator won’t work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.
  
  Agreed, that's the problem.
  
  Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search.
  
  Also agreed, that would be a solution. I'm doubtful wether they deem a particular network important enough to justify the extra effort on their part.
  
  Is it possible to pipe search queries through a website? If yes, then let's make a fedi-search! In which you can find any publicly available fediverse content.
  
  Would it then be possible to google for site:fedi-search?
I think it's a bold move for Google to present Perspectives as a new feature to improve user experience when really, it just makes it easier for them to present sponsored content in different formats. Astroturfed advertisments (fake "ordinary customer reviews," usually) have been a thing on social media for ages, especially on YouTube, and Perspectives is just giving Google a creative way to get eyeballs on those ads.

Using the Reddit implosion as a jumping off point is also clever, and I think it's evidence that Google doesn't plan on paying for API access next month, or ever. They don't want to take advantage of Reddit's data, they just want to take back the eyeballs that Reddit attracts.

(... not that Reddit was ever immune to astroturfing, of course, but I think strong community moderation made it better than YouTube, which doesn't give users much opportunity to get rid of fake reviews. Now that they have chased off a lot of mods and nerfed their tools, I expect the authenticity of Reddit product reviews to decrease dramatically).
The cynic in me sees a symbiotic relationship between Google and Reddit.

I started messing around on Reddit around 2007, but it felt like a firehose. Google's results covered what I was looking for to the extent that I didn't need a second source for most searches, and my job involved reading the AP wire, so I was decently covered on news with additional RSS feeds at home.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm noticing the pattern that most genuinely helpful information is coming from Reddit (as well as no longer being in a newsroom), so I join, and the experience is far better with subreddits (sorry, hipsters). It wasn't yet readily apparent that Reddit was not only getting better at being comprehensive, but Google was also getting worse.

In the late beforetimes, maybe 2019, Google became useful for searching Reddit and finding product information for items I already knew about. And nothing else. Even with coding questions, there are a lot of red herrings. Without Reddit results, I'd have noticed Google's search irrelevance far earlier.
I add site names to searches all the time. For example, if you want medical information instead of advertisements for dick pills, you can add "site:nih.gov" to your search
Too late. On the advice of another Lemmy thread, I started trying Kagi a couple weeks ago, for exactly this reason. I highly doubt I'll come back; it's been working great for me, and given how important search is to me both personally and professionally, it's easily, easily worth the price.

41 comments