Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.

  • Tenthrow@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • drphungky@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • achensherd@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it’s safe to assume chat GPT’s training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.

        • ConTheLibrarian@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • mioko@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This means they realize that whole search is so useless that people have to rely on reddit for actually finding something useful.

    • swan_pr@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yet, we rely on Google to search reddit because their search function is useless lol

  • Gentoo1337@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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).

    • meiti@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That was one of the last ways of getting some useful results out of Google.

      • Trevader24135@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

  • shiftenter@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • MrGG@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • cmrn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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…

    • kat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • sacredbirdman@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Orvanis@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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…?

    • Braggston08@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      im adding “-youtube” to searches for a long time. The amount of Clickbaitvideos, no matter what you are searching for, is just crazy.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • 5200@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The YouTube videos that should have been a post or an article shoved down your throat are aggravating.

  • dezmd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • amonkeyfullofbarrels@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • figaro@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Risk@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.