this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I've been linking this text fairly often, but I think that it's worth a read. People might be focusing on the blackout but that's just the "now" - with or without blackouts, Reddit is a ticking bomb bound to eventually explode, and all the information there will be lost when it does.
And the fact that people have been relying on Reddit to look for information shows even deeper issues, not just with Reddit but the internet. Let's see...
Mostly because it's better than other options though. For instance, when I use DDG, lots of boolean handles just don't work. If I look for "cat sweater -dog", I'm going to get nothing but dog sweaters. I find fewer useful, productive results on DDG than I do on Google. Other search engines are often even worse.
I tested this out, and I consistently got cat sweaters:
so odds are that the boolean handles issue is either messier (triggered under more specific conditions than in your example) or already fixed.
That said, I do agree with you that quality is one of the factors here; since Google search is considerably better than the alternatives, it feels no pressure to improve. But the problem is still there, we've been relying on a single search engine to find stuff for us, you get users learning how to work around those issues of that single search engine, and they won't be solved.
[Completely off-topic]I can't picture my cats using a sweater like this for more than five seconds. One would go full "cat.exe stopped working" and the other would shred it into pieces.