this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Google search has been a shitshow for years.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

The reddit thing was even described as a "hack" to google search iirc

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Internet has been slowly getting gutted since at least 2015.

It is to the point that a regular search engine is useless for actual research unless you are a power user and even then it is censored.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah thats why i use duck duck go, its not perfect, but a lot better than Google or the others.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ducks fly together! Brave search is pretty decent too, if you haven't tried it yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Brave is kinda sus to me.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I instinctively scroll down 1-2 screens now to get past all the ads and promoted pages. It's like Amazon the few times I use that. Fully enshittified. I just use Bing most of the time which isn't any better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I started using Swisscows about a year ago and I'm never going back. Clean, simple, uncluttered. No trackers or "personalization".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I can't stand searching for a product on Amazon anymore. If I really want to use Amazon, it's much more efficient to find the amazon link using duck duck go.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ublock is your friend

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's not all Google's fault though. With the obliteration of online news and forums, there just isn't much indexable content out there that isn't trash. It's only getting worse with AI spitting out garbage remixes of the same crap on pages that post more ads than content. Reddit was a bastion of real content written by real humans delivered in a mostly friendly way.

So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve? No one wants the trash content. The next "best" thing is Quora and that's entirely hostile even if it manages to accidentally contain valid content.

Corporate has managed to destroy the Internet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve?

Google has the entire Deja News (Usenet) archive, more valuable than Reddit except for the older age. And they don't let you access it anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Google is doing nothing with their Usenet archive. Hopefully they haven't destroyed it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

DuckDuckGo manages it mostly fine. At least, the results are more consistent, even if there's the 1-in-50 chance it misses something Google would get.

The cynic in me suspects that Google makes their real results worse to increase ad results which are "close enough."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Quora feels most of time is where humans try to write like an AI.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Not even joking, I was trying to search for something just slightly niche the day before yesterday and I got so fed up with Google that I actually used Bing. And you know what? It was noticeably better. We truly went down the wrong pantleg into this universe.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago