this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Google is getting a lot worse because of subreddits being private (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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What do you guys think about this? (Wasn't sure which community to post this in)

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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...

  1. Google monopoly over the search market. Why would it need to make its product better, if you're still going to use it?
  2. Corporations always trying to prevent you from reaching the best result (because it won't lead you to their product), and engaging on an arms race through search engine optimisation. That's why people did that "reddit" trick.
  3. The encroachment of the ad industry into the internet. Oh look, I found the content that I wanted... no wait it's another ad. Move on...
  4. Governments more often pandering to corporations than defending the best interests of their taxpayers, and the legislation on what's allowed or disallowed on the internet suffering in result of that.
  5. Reddit monopoly over discussions.
  6. People sharing info in Reddit instead of through more resilient forms of digital media, as shown in the link.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Google monopoly over the search market.

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If I look for “cat sweater -dog”, I’m going to get nothing but dog sweaters.

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.

[–] ShutYourPieHole 15 points 2 years ago

The irony is that Google is treated as an evil enterprise that only wants your data and yet we all willingly gave Reddit all our data and information while talking about how evil Google is.

I've gone looking for a few solutions to issues and the results were Reddit threads. Thanks for the cache trick, I'll keep that in mind to hopefully continue to avoid Reddit. Ideally we have a better solution in the future that does not result in all our data being held hostage.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

At least in Google Chrome, you can add "cache:" to the beginning of the reddit URL to retrieve a cached version of the site. It's worked for most of the reddit links I've needed to access.

eg: cache:https://reddit.com/r/...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Aah great. I tried a search about oil on the exhaust today and the first google result was a reddit post, but when I went to read it it says private sub. I couldn't find the cache option on Android Chrome so found results on other sites.

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

Take the useful information you find and make a post on the fediverse! That way we'll have that information going forward and won't need to rely on cached info.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

I already encountered this a few times while searching for something specific. Even though the protests are understandable it makes it so much harder to find information.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Seems unrelated to open source?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I agree, too many communities here keep getting meta discussion about Reddit - and the open community aspect of Lemmy isn't very organized.

That said...

This sort of change by the community isn't new. One of Twitter's great strengths was that it was an identifiable brand and you could tell someone a username and it was mostly unambiguous.

I remember the days when Usenet archive ran out of money, before Google purchased it back in early 2001: https://www.wired.com/2001/02/google-buys-deja-archive/ - searching Usenet archives was going to be lost.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I think it would be more accurate to say that Google has gotten a lot worse over time, and removing the crutch of reddit results is making that suddenly more obvious. Google results mostly suck, but you can sometimes find what you're actually looking for on reddit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I noticed it myself too! Hopefully we can get a good way to search through the internet archive backup of reddit people are building soon, or at least get those posts pushed out through the fediverse so people can see them.

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

This was an interesting video on the topic from before the blackout. Its definitely a multi layered problem but the blackout is just showing how bad Google and SEO has gotten:

https://youtu.be/48AOOynnmqU

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

Today I got a feeling of that!

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