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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It is astounding how reliant some mega corporations are on what people do for free. If people coordinated they could do serious harm to Google bottom line.
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’.
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....?
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.
Now imagine I own the encyclopedia, and Walmart offers me money.
So i paste Walmart's Xmas catalogue pages in between the useful information in the encyclopedia. You ask about frog facts, you get frog pajamas. You try to look up cultural information and get travel ticket prices. You never planned on purchasing anything, and you are too poor too anyway. But somehow I and Walmart make money off of your displeasure.
This is ad revenue. This is the modern economy. Its a sham. Its an infinite money go brrrttt machine for billionaires.
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.
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.
The natural degredation of google just comes down to the incredibly stupid levels of search engine optimization and ads. Most articles in particular are so terrible, I'm convinced a lot of them are just written by bots. What I want are answers actually written by humans on discussion boards with a rating system. That's what made me add "reddit" to the end of everything. Genuine humans, NOT people being paid to write articles or ads.
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…
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.
I'm not shocked whatsoever. Especially as of a few months ago, I only get SEO spam around 80% of the time, unless I stick [r word] in front of my query. It's not even just Google or just [r word] going to shit, I can see the internet of just 10 years ago dying in front of my eyes.
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 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.
I read half this article and just thought, “yeah no shit.” I swear Google conditioned everyone to just settle for dumb answers.
It’s amazing how few people understand how SEM works or the fact that Google makes services for freely available in order to build a profile on you and sell targeted ad space. The algorithm is tuned to for clicks. The amount of sponsored results and crappy listicles you need to scroll through is unreal. “Reddit” was the shortcut to opinions outside of sponsored influencers with affiliate links… but I’m sure TikTok and YouTube will fill that void just fine.
remember, when the execs of an evilcorp announce that their users are unhappy with something, it usually means that the execs are unhappy with something (and it's usually their profit margin)
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.
@L4s What I'm frustrated with Google search engine, is how it prevent to be smart and kept suggesting keywords that are not relevant to what in searching, the suggested result is totally irrelevant except for one common letter.
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.
Google has not been shy about grabbing content from other sites and showing it directly on their search page.
I imagine part of their frustration is that the technical issue of caching and showing relevant reddit/stackexchange/y!answers in their search results is a solved problem, but they're being held back by pesky legal and business constraints, and therefore are forced to remain vulnerable to external events.
Google today reminds me of what AltaVista became before Google. ChatGPT is amazing but now it and other LLMs are being used to generate crap content. I fear that the incestuous nature of AI training on AI may lead to “inbreeding” and all the problems that brings with it.
I'm "not quite happy" with the current state of Google, either. What are you going to do about that? You used to be a good search engine... what the hell happened?
Users weren't happy with the search results before the blackout either, and "quite" has no part in it. Google traded quality results for revenue over a decade ago... right about the time they changed their Don't Be Evil motto.
This is a good change as it may expand to more sites. I'm one of those users that used reddit in query often looking for opinions or reviews. We should get Lemmy on the list.
If Google makes changes that stop people from clicking through to reddit due to the protests then the protests will have likely done more lasting damage than anyone imagined.
Reddit search sucks, I literally use google to search stuff in Reddit
Things I've never seen: Page 2 of Google
to
I literally need to add reddit when I do a google search
I cannot find what I want after page 5
Google used to be synonymous with reliable results and Reddit as the awkward website you barely spoke about. Now you need to use reddit to find proper results because the slow bleeding that is SEO has screwed over Google.
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