- cross-posted to:
- snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
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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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.
I’m using startpage.com for a few months now, I’m surprisingly quite happy with the quality of search results.
DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.
https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.
https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.
But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.
Not sure i like metered searches… and $25/month seems steep for unlimited.
But i will try this out, i would gladly pay for actually good search. Maybe keep google for simple web navigation then the $5 tier kagi for more nuanced search, should keep under the 300 search limit with that approach
I use Kagi and never pay more than $10/mo even though I use it a lot. I think most people don’t know how much they search in a month, so the pricing can be confusing.
I have the early adopter pro plan, which gives me extra searches (1500 instead of 1000), but for reference, I averaged 1044 searches/mo over the past 6 months (not counting this month). So if I had the standard pro plan, I’d have paid $10.66 per month on average.
The unlimited plan seems excessive to me, unless you’re playing with the API or something like that.
Ecosia has been pretty okay for me. Additionally, they are a non-profit that plants trees based off user usage.
Kagi is a premium search engine that aims to have the highest quality search results. They use algorithms to surface up more indie content, like blogs, and downrank tracker-heavy pages and blog/SEO spam. The difference between Kagi and Google is night and day.
Startpage is pretty good.
That’s why people stopped using a lot of the surface web.
And all that is before you get to AI and LLMs. Personally, I haven’t used Google once since I got access to Bing Chat back in Feb/March. For east low stakes questions, I can use Bing or ChatGPT, for high stakes questions I’m going to a specialized information website, for buying things I’m looking for expert reviews like wirecutter (after looking for a mattress I’ve grown skeptical about the authenticity of even reddit as mattress reviews were clearly astroturfed). I’m having trouble of thinking of a use case for where I would need or want to use Google.
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
It’s really frustrating how much blatantly AI-written shit is at the top of every Google search nowadays.
Like, you Google “how to install a door” and you find an article that’s like
“Here’s how you install a door. Installing a door is really easy when you know how This guide will tell you how to install a door on ten easy steps. The first step in installing your door is to pick a door at the store.” It repeats the title of the article everyother damn sentence, and takes FOREVER to get to a useful point. And sometimes they give flat out incorrect advice.
Then, you check the urland it’s something like “techbuiz.com” and you’ve never even heard of this shit before, why the hellisit the top indexed result?
This isn’t a problem to do with the reddit blackout at all, it’s the enshittification of Google algorithm. They sell those top slots to the highest bidder, it’s no longer about who actually has relevant information about the thing you searched for, it’s about who had just enough matching keywords AND gave Google money to put up top.
Of course Google blames other sites, like reddit. It makes up all kinds of bullshit to obfuscate what they are doing, and sin e they have a proprietary algorithm nobody can prove that they are doing what I described above. But it’s so blatantly obvious that they are that it’s nearly insulting that they keep pretending they aren’t.
Removed by mod
Random vaguely relevant confession: Every time I see “RDR2,” I misread it as R2D2.
We all do.
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
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?
Yep now Google is 99% useless. Bunch of AI written nonsense
It’s useless for tech. But a much larger pool of users are using google to still search scores of games, YouTube and cat gifs.
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?
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.
undefined> 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.
Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos
First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we’re ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we’ll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.
I really doubt this. I hate to be that guy, but 90% of things I want to follow are on Twitter still. Very few on mastodon. I’m sure it’s a people circle thing.
It’s way too easy to use Twitter and complain… it’s way to easy to use reddit … (if you use their app) and complain.
I don’t think there is going to be any sort of mass migration that leaves any of these overnight. All of this stuff needs to be better for end users, not just for people who like the technicals and general idea of the fediverse.
Let me know when companies are on Lemmy and Mastadon. Some companies do support via Twitter. Heck I’ve gotten better deals from Comcast via their subreddit. Then again there is a general fear of companies being on the fediverse… so would I get that experience here ever? Idk… but it’s a minus for me.
Edit for tldr: I feel like there is a pseido-toxic echo chamber in the fediverse as a whole that will likely harm it in the long run. I don’t see it as being a replacement for other things for regular users at the current trajectory. Hope it changes though.
I’d prefer if all those companies just stay on Twitter and leave Lemmy/Mastadon alone. Their influence is what got the internet into the mess that it’s currently in.
there’s a browser plug in for that.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
Which isn’t entirely accurate if at all. It extrapolates the dislikes from its own database ie users who have it installed. Compared to the entire user base of Youtube this is an incredibly tiny sample size.
You need a much, much smaller sample size than you think. Estimates for Youtube’s monthly unique visits range from ~2 billion to about ~2.7 billion. For a 5% margin of error at a 99.9% confidence level, you’d only need to sample 1083 people to get an accurate sample size.
I’m positive that extension has more than 1000 users.
Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?
You’d have to have a separate cohort of non-plugin users & another with a sampling of both, I think. Run some regressions on those data and I think you’d be able to tease out any bias that exists.
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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It’s so accurate it hurts me
That’s way too straight forward for Kojima. You need at least 3 more hours of cutscenes.
A few weeks ago, when things started to get heated, I had the reflex of copying all the helpful posts I made amd putting them on my own knowledge base in case something goes wrong with reddit. I can always put them somewhere since I’ve secured that info on my own server.
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
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:
- restart
- the same generic fix you already saw on the last 10 websites that didn’t work
- download our totally legit software that’s specially designed to fix this exact issue
I’m in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google’s attempt to be useful was to to search for “baluster” instead of “banister”. It’s a complete fucking joke.
And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you’ve ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I’m located in the US.
People will just have to start adding lemmy instead :)
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.
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.
it’s weird that all these articles talk about this only being a problem for people who put “reddit” in the URL; I never do that, and 90% of the time when I search Google for something (especially something about a video game), the first 5 or so results are all from reddit anyway.
