Google execs admit users are 'not quite happy' with search experience after Reddit blackouts
Google execs admit users are 'not quite happy' with search experience after Reddit blackouts
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.
I just checked the perspectives tab, since I’m on mobile. I guess Google wants people to be less reliant on Reddit, but it’s like… User-generated content on Reddit vs. Twitter/Tiktok/Youtube are not the same? Usually I put “reddit” in the search bc I want a quick and well-informed text-based answer to something. That’s still going to be the easiest thing to do.
There are some high quality forms out there. G really needs to hook into these forums and the fediverse if they need to replace the reddit content.
Text is why I always add reddit to a search too. I do not want a video in response to my search, pretty much ever, and on the rare occasion I do, I go straight to YouTube.
I don't understand how YouTube results from Google are so fucking useless. How is it not returning the same results you'd get if you searched on YouTube? Who designs this shit?
Yeah that will be the thing I miss the most when looking for stuff as I try to rely less on reddit.
I get so tired of trying find information via blogs or YouTube. Most of them are:
"So you may have an issue doing this thing or you want to learn more about this thing so we are going to tell you about this thing. Blah blah blah as they go on telling you in different ways about how they are going to tell you and other reasons why you want to hear what they are about to tell you."
Mostly seems to be a way to make you scroll down and be bombarded with ads (if you do not use an ad block)
Soo frustrating and waste of my time.
At 10-11 minutes they get a second ad roll, so 99% of videos are about this length.
It's almost a certainty that a 2:30 video has more information than an 11:01 video.
It's shocking to see how bad they've become at what used to be their core function. I mean their brand name became the verb for looking something up on the internet. Now it just returns a useless mix of advertising, blogspam, AI spam, and sometimes-useful reddit results.
I'm also not quite happy with the search experience due to them constantly moving UI components around randomly. First they started shuffling around the order of the search tabs (All, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) erratically, and now they've also decided to also start including what they believe may be related search terms there as well, sometimes.
"Another employee question in the companywide meeting asked if Google can more easily surface “authentic discussion” since the “Reddit blackout” was making it harder to find such content.
CEO Sundar Pichai chimed in to to say that users don’t want “blue links” as much as they want “more comprehensive answers.”
No I'm pretty sure people really are looking for authentic discussion, twisting that to say that we want more comprehensive answers is clearly Pichai trying to make the situation fit what he already wants to do: implement generative AI in response to searches to keep people on the site.
To get a genuine opinion on “what is the best [whatever]” is an impossibility now with result after result of Amazon affiliate lists of utter garbage.
Try to compare 2 pieces of computer hardware and be faced with results from UserShitMark or other affiliate laden shitbags.
Google Search is ruined with all the inorganic shit it gravitates to.
Google would probably like to take over the user generated content somehow. If people can find it on Google even when it is not available on Reddit then it is pure profit for Google. They already provide a lot of information on their search pages bypassing the sources. Google is not our friend. Not any more.
Google would probably like to take over the user generated content somehow. If people can find it on Google even when it is not available on Reddit then it is pure profit for Google
All they would have to do is start Deja News (the most famous free Usenet server and archive) back up. They could do it tomorrow if they wanted to. And I guarantee you it would be talked about on /s/redditalternatives and /m/RedditMigration
Yeah, this is something I thought about as soon as the blackout started. I am in the IT world and as soon as it happened, it got really difficult to find certain bits of crucial information, because those bits of info were stored within Reddit comments.
Anyone in the tech world can tell you that besides Stack Overflow and Github, Reddit is right up there among the most leaned-on tech resources these days. Never before was there a bigger forum of tech people discussing their work. Those results were suddenly, instantly no longer valid, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who noticed that. This is part of why Reddit was scrambling to open subs back up - if more than 2 or 3 weeks went by, Google would have removed those listings from the search.
That was probably the only good thing reddid offered, google searches.
Whenever I had a tech related issue I added reddit at the end and I knew I'll find the solution instead of going through MS and other official sites who for some reason had the thread as solved but no solution to be found.