Google execs admit users are ‘not quite happy’ with search experience after Reddit blackouts
cnbc.com
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
It's going to be interesting watching the downfall of Google.
Google's got a bit of a problem: THE search engine, THE place people have gone to find information for two generations now...can't find shit. And it's about half its own fault.
I'll put right around half of the blame on "platformization." Your Facebooks and your Twitters are, for the most part, deep web. Google doesn't get to search Facebook; you have to sign into a Facebook account to see much of what's there. Twitter is slightly more open...but not really.
The other half of the problem is Google's own making; the surface web is a twisted, pus-leaking cancerous abomination of its former self, riddled with absolute useless nonsense vomited up by computers for the express purpose of convincing Google to show it to searchers, with no intention of being useful in any way. So the surface web is effectively bullshit and online shopping.
That leaves Reddit. A for-profit platform on the surface web. Even before this whole fiasco, folks were making grumbling noises that they've gotten in the habit of appending "reddit" to google search strings because a. that's where all the actual answers are and b. Reddit's own search feature has never actually worked. So some of Reddit goes private for a few days and suddenly Google doesn't work so well.
So what are we keeping them around for?
Are there any quality alternatives to Google? I use DuckDuckGo, but i don't feel that the results are much better - if i remember correctly DDG uses Bing beneath the surface.
Startpage is pretty good.
Google has never sucked more than it does now. I miss the old internet before megacorps turned it into a huge shopping mall that barks propaganda at you while you shop.
Legitimately the mega corps are the least problem with Google search these days. Once you get past the ads and sponsored content at the top, you get tons of blogspam that is written solely to maximize SEO and get page views. This was bad before generative AI, but now people can generate whole websites on "the best impact hammer" or "how to buy solar panels" without even paying a shitty copywriter. Google is literally unusable for anything like that. I have to go watch 10 YouTube videos to get an idea, and even some of THOSE are text to speech product spec regurgitators, again just content farming for affiliate links.
The internet is just fucking awful these days. Thats why people look for Reddit links. Reddit was its own community for a very long time generating content and curating good content generated elsewhere. It was a filter for all the bullshit filler, but Google looks at everything without nearly as good separation of quality from affiliate spam as Reddit has.
Of course they are. Adding "Reddit" at the end of questions and other stuff was the best way of avoiding shitty results (Fuck you Quora).
That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.
It depends what you were searching for. For help with Stable Diffusion or programming questions or other technical subjects, the reddit communities were actually one of the best places I could go to for answers
They still are on archive.org. you'll get the info you need and reddit gets nothing. Win win
Google should just buy Reddit so they can shut them down six months later.
Months? You mean weeks.
Are you saying they were going to... regReddit?
First they will rename it few times, Reddit+, RedditOut, RedditWave then merge it will Google Groups wait for a year and then pull the plug.
This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.
Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol
As someone who had millions of karma and 70+ front page posts on reddit, I deleted all my posts and comments so those Google results would lead to nothing. In fact reddit banned me for that and setting my subreddits to private. Now I'll be reposting all that content to Lemmy. No money for you Reddit.
Have you checked to make sure Reddit didn't restore your comments? They've been doing that to a bunch of people.
So far they have not.
You still can request a data export to see what they still have.
As a plus point if your GPDR request was logged and they can't fulfill it in 90 days they will be fined.
They won't be fined if you don't report it
I didn't realize how important Reddit was to get quality results from Google. Without Reddit almost the whole 1st page is just SEO optimized sites. It's just ironic that alternate search engines are better than Google now.
I used Bing to find a parts diagram for my car after repeatedly failing to do so with Google. I’m sure I could’ve eventually found it with Google using the correct combination of operators and such, but at that point why bother.
What's even more annoying than google populating half the first page with ads is that the links don't even work half the time these days.
If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it's safe to assume chat GPT's training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.
That would explain why it's all written like wiki content edited by a redditor.
Fuuuuuuck... Imagine if chat GPT started amending its results with.. "EDIT: wElL tHiS bLeW uP oVeRnIgHt... tHaNkS fOr ThE gOlD kInD ReDdiToR"
That'd be so damn annoying haha
Like that story of a child saying "remember to like and subscribe" at bedtime because she thought that was the words for goodbye
Wait is that some kid IRL? Or we talking about gpt speaking as a child?
I remember the art of crafting the perfect google search query and knowing you'd eventually find that obscure bit of info. Now I have to quote nearly everything in my query and if a single result in the first 100 results is tangentially related, I'm grateful.
I remember being good at google-fu, and then thinking my google-fu was failing me.
No, it was the Google that failed me.
I've noticed this too, and I want to say it was only noticeable in the last year or two — but it seems to have gotten even worse over the last couple of weeks. Even when I quote something or -exclude a term it is still giving me what it thinks I actually wanted.
Google search is a pain from a year ago.
When searching for something on Google, you should include terms like “Reddit”, “superuser”, “Stack Overflow”, etc., to get better results. Because if you don't include them, the first page of Google looks like a bot-generated page. Of course, Google are ‘not quite happy’.
That was one of the first things that I thought about. People can't affix "Reddit" to their Google searches in good faith anymore, so what is the next most reliable community?
It's amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.
In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we've built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn't, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add "site:reddit.com" to the query. But if the niche communities die, that's a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.
Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.
So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit's own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won't realise this.
I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.
My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.
Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.
Keep checking, see what happens
Although I suspect edits are less likely to be restored than edits+deletions, or even edits alone.
Certainly, I've had a couple comments that I manually edited that have stayed, while a few others have popped back up.
But so far, comments that I have edited and deleted from the source URL have stayed down. It's only the edits from the profile (using PowerDeleteSuite) where some have come back. Granted, most were old, now I'm getting info the recent ones they've been lingering on.
I still have a good 28,000 out of 76,000 lines to get through though from my original CSV file. I will make sure they're all processed before 1 July, and if reddit restores any of them I'll have logs to show their violation.
I have to say, though, that this Fediverse stuff (I'm new) smacks of the "old Internet." I love it. This is such a breath of fresh air.
I think Google is headed to breach the trust thermocline (warning: a twitter link). I think why these collapses seem sudden and so large in scale is because there's so much inertia. Services / products that have become the standard can go well below the line that would be accepted otherwise and that's why they don't see big changes in user base while the enshittification process goes on.. So, for them the point where a large portion of the user base is even willing to try alternatives is already way too far.. and no small corrections is going to cut it. They try to find out what they did in the last months to cause this exodus but the reality is that they've been worse than competitors for years.
Apparently, that guy cross-posts to Mastodon.
Yeah, no kidding. Google's been getting lazy with its search results. The first dozen hits on most Google searches are either YouTube or Reddit results.
My biggest concern with the downfall or even small proportional depopulation of Reddit is 100% going to be /r/sysadmin and /r/msp not being the best place to determine if there is an actual outage in progress for various cloud based IT services. I mean, it's a real, legit concern to worry over if you're in IT.
Lemmy has one comm for Dev/Ops I think but not the convenience of having a place for network guys, sysadmins, and programmers all in different spots.
While we are fixing things Google, can we also not have the first 20 results be YouTube videos that are 30 minutes long, when the answer I want is typically a sentence or two....?
im adding "-youtube" to searches for a long time. The amount of Clickbaitvideos, no matter what you are searching for, is just crazy.
I still think it’s absolutely insane that Google just willingly runs ads to so many illegitimate and deliberately harmful sites too.
If you search for any software and click one of the first few links (the ads), you’ll almost always end up on a scam site. What a useful search engine…
I downloaded a virus in high school computer lab. I was looking to download Chrome, and Google pushed a scam Chrome link to the top. I still have no idea how or why it happened.
It would be cheaper for google to just buy reddit, remove the adds and open the api's again.
Having relevent search results is priceless.
Reddit.com appears on KilledByGoogle.com next year.
Knowing google they would buy it, release a big roadmap of plans for the website and then shut it down the next day.
lol, this is google we're talking about
Big suprise! I'm this close to Uninstaller reddit.
Current way to search on google for me is: Add reddit to search string, and set data to before may 1st 2023 Copy link suggested by google and change reddit to reveddit or any of the alternatives there
Results will go out of date but maybe this will tide me over until a good lemmy search is up and running.
Say the execs of the company who has ruined the internet with seo crap.
It's pretty incredible how often I put “Reddit” in a Google search. It really is the quickest way to get a good answer to most questions, from how to fix an Excel error to which robot vacuum is most reliable.
I still remember the vacuum dude. There was a legendary post probably a decade ago made by the world's most knowledgeable vacuum salesman. He laid out all the secrets of the industry, and went into detail I didn't know I needed regarding how they all work.
To this day I remember his advice: get a bagged vacuum if you want a clean carpet.
Not a vacuum salesman but repair man. Still active on reddit, but that's the last AMA he did.
I doubt vacuums have changed that much in 4 years.
They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google's retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn't satisfy it's ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.
I literally couldn't find Lemmy.world on Google by searching Lemmy.world, it was wild to see that.
Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.
Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match... They don't fucking work anymore.
We just need to keep it up. Contribute to the communities we like, and we will rank up surely. :)
I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).
Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn't significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.
i imagine a fedisearch engine will come out that can search lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. efficiently; so instead of googling "how to x site:reddit.com", we'll just fedisearch "how to x"
in fact, i'm pretty sure i already found one but it wasn't very good, and i've forgotten it's name
Honestly Google Search in general seems to get worse every year, for work any kind of niche issue involving errors returns no results on Google (literally no results), tried plugging the same search into Bing and the first 5 results were actual answers on solving the error
It amazes me how a search engine once considered a massive joke is able to outperform Google
I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.
What is even more surprising is the Bing ChatGPT diagnosed the PC problem I was having when I never would have guessed the correct search terms for it.
It even gives me citations. So, I can go to those websites and read the whole answers
I wonder about the odds that Google would buy reddit. Not saying it's a good thing, but it could be a strategic play for them.
If they did they'd probably just scuttle it after a few years. It's what they do.
Super interesting the trick we all thought was a secret, stopped working, and now executives from one of the worlds biggest companies are having trouble as a result lol
Google search has been pretty weak for awhile now. I/O spoke a lot of big talk about bring generative AI into search, but from my part of the world it still seems the same.
Ai isn't going to fix the first page being all ads, that's a business decision.
If they wanted to return actual content they could do that without AI.
that's not even close to the issue, though – Google Search fell because of SEO pushing irrelevant auto-generated garbage towards the top.
I think it's both - the SEO fight as well as the explosion of ads on Page 1. Throw in a dash of average-user search optimization (vs a flatter term-based search) and you've got Googles downfall in a nutshell.
Whats bothering me the most about it is that Reddit is still a valuable source of information for so many things, can't get around a boss fight in a certain older videogame? Yep, there are about 10 threads about it on reddit from years ago.
The amount information on there is big enough that often times many of the top useful search results are in reddit, I hope Lemmy can fill the gap, at least partially but I'm aware that it could years and that's only if the fediverse picks up well enough.
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That's way too straight forward for Kojima. You need at least 3 more hours of cutscenes.
It's so accurate it hurts me
That's not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don't like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it's an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.
I haven't been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it's just stupid crap that isn't helpful. 'Here's 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.'
How to fix your tech problem:
I've started using DDG as defacto since the last 3 months. Use Google search only for sports updates because they've good widgets for those.
I gave an effort to DDG for months and I really wanted to like that but it hasn't been that good for me. Image search especially is really subpar, but also in general searches a lot of times I had to resort to using !g after messing around trying to actually find what I wanted.
I don't like Google but I have to admit that their principle product is above the competition right now. I hope it'll change but honestly, with adblock if Google search is the only service I'm using from them and it's working out I'm kinda okay with that.
If they start plastering their results with even more ads tho, I'll definetly jump ship in a heartbeat.
You might want to give Searx a shot. It's a FOSS, self-hosted (with several public instances) search engine that can pull results from several other search providers while stripping ads/tracking/personal data.
I've been using DDG for a few years now. Occasionally when I can't get the results I need there I try a !g search to see if Google will give better results. They never do. I have no idea where this "DDG search results are bad" argument comes from.
Who still uses Google in 2023
What do you use? Bing? Yahoo?
https://www.duckduckgo.com
Is it any good? I haven't used it in ages. Last time I used it was a few years ago, and it kept returning bad results.
I've been using DDG pretty much exclusively for the past couple years now, so yes it works just fine. If you want to see what another search engine would have shown you, you can use a "bang" , and search wikipedia or reddit for example. Pretty useful !
Holy shit bangs are amazing. I'll need to add this to my daily use. Consciously remind myself to do it until it becomes habit. Thanks!
Startpage still seem to give me good search results despite using Google index itself. I guess a lack filter bubble have its own benefits.