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that’s literally the only reason i still end up visiting the site after I left it
Same, sometimes Google sends me to Reddit, it’s the only visits they get from me
Oh no that is a very bad idea. Google search is the only way to find things on reddit
This would be so fucking annoying, I don’t use reddit day to day anymore but it’s still a useful research tool when I see results from it on Google. I don’t hate their search feature quite as much as some but I still don’t want to use it most of the time.
This seems so dumb for them to do, I feel like having their content listed on search engines is s major advantage they have over Facebook et al.
over Facebook et al.
Public Facebook posts are indexed in Google. I think public groups are too. There’s just so much content (given how much larger Facebook is) that I doubt Google actually indexes every single public post.
Duckduckgo
If they block Google, they will likely block DDG an every other search engine.
You’ll probably need to be logged in to see anything with rate limits so bots can’t crawl the site.
Well, that depends on how they implement the block, if its by domain or a blanket block (which would make sense, but I’ve seen weirder shit done online)
I don’t think DDG runs its own indexer. It’s a frontend to other search engines.
Right; they mostly use Bing. Bing is the largest search engine that has an official API, so the majority of services that need search functionality use it, including voice assistants like Siri and Bixby, smaller search engines like DuckDuckGo, etc.
Fog, DuckDuckGo is bonkers useless for Reddit search
Reddit commits suicide, more at 11.
Pretty hard to kill yourself, when you are already dead. They are pretty much a zombie company at this point, much like X.
BFWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That sounds like something someone who has never tried to use reddit’s own search would say.
Reddit who?
Yeah that’s a bluff. Google searches surely make up a huge portion of their traffic.
Google search results are literally the only time I read Reddit content these days, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. They’re going to lose so many views if they block their content on Google.
I’m guessing with the API dead it’s the only way to find content on Reddit anymore, too. I can’t imagine the Reddit searches that worked weren’t using the API, and Reddit’s search is a dumpster fire.
The one thing Reddit is great for, and for which substitutes do not yet exist, is its crowdsourced information. Especially product reviews. And finding those from within Reddit is impossible because their search simply does not work.
Appending “Reddit” to a Google search remains the best first-past method for making certain kinds of decisions where you need concrete, good-quality answers. Even for that, it’s a bit of a minefield. Especially post-mod-purge, a lot of the once-great enthusiast subs have gotten pretty blase. Still better than all those consumer advertorial “BEST OF 2024” lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.
On top of that, the “new” sight is a million times less usable than old.reddit.com and search engines shoot you in through that terrifically terrible gateway to experience confusingly-organized and incomplete content. Orders of magnitude worse on mobile, too.
If Reddit is de-indexed, I’ll simply never be there at this point. Though I admit, I’m already there extremely rarely.
There was slant for a bit. Turned out to not be as reactive to market distributions.
Stack exchange has some good stuff going for it.
The browser add-ons for redirecting to old.reddit are doing good work. Best add-ons 2023
Yeah, I’ve used one, but there is also sloowly accumulating bitrot there. It’s not getting any work done on it, and Reddit was pretty clear that they weren’t going to do more work on it.
Submissions of image collections have some bad link; they didn’t exist back when old.reddit.com was the norm.
www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com handle underscores in URLs pasted straight into Markdown and auto-linkified differently (one requires that they be backslash-escaped, the other that they not be backslash-escaped).
There’s some kind of inline image stuff in the new UI, IIRC, that doesn’t show up on old.reddit.com. I was surprised when I bipped over to the new UI and saw it.
You can hack a dark mode in in various ways, but it’s normally a light theme.
Not really specific to just the old Web UI, but third-party client issue is a factor for phone users. Reddit’s web UI on mobile isn’t fantastic. old.reddit.com is okay for desktop use, but it’s not really a great solution for phones.
Still better than all those consumer advertorial “BEST OF 2024” lists that you find everywhere full of extremely mediocre and likely corrupt reviews, but nothing compared to the straightforward buying guides you used to find.
The SEO spam that I find that Google is absolutely unable to filter out is all the AI-generated sites. They generally have a page with a long list of questions and poorly-generated answers.
It don’t know if it’s one company doing it at mass scale or if there are hordes of copycats, but it swamps Google search results these days.
New here? Japanese website have been mostly like that for decades now.
I haven’t used Japanese websites enough to be able to provide a comparison.
It definitely wasn’t the situation for English-based websites five years back. It was an issue at the beginning of this year. I don’t know where it really started.
Though I admit, I’m already there extremely rarely.
I always experience an onosecond after accidentally clicking on a Reddit thread in the search results. Followed by a short wave of disgust by the often mean/negative comments and pressing Mouse 4/Back.
Wait, I just realized I can block reddit.com completely in kagi. 10$/month nicely spent; begone thot!
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
Looks nice, but for me features like fastgpt are worth the 10$/month
Yeah. I only ever read reddit posts when they’re about a technical issue I’m facing.
Besides, Reddit’s search is crap. When I was on Reddit, I used to use Google to search posts.
Seriously. Searching google with
site:reddit.comis a thing for a reason. Their on site search is atrocious.
True, but Google search is such garbage now that it would suffer quite a bit from not being able to present Reddit threads to answer questions. So not sure who’d be worse off here
What’s wrong with Google? I can honestly say I’ve never had issues. If you haven’t given it location privileges, that’s the only time I’ve seen it give crappy results
there was definitely a time where i got some results from google in a very ad-like manner, super fucking annoying: “you may like this…” and spamming different search terms, locations etc.
i haven’t seen it since, i figured they were A/B testing the design
It’s gotten really worse over the last year or so. They try to be overly “intelligent” by suggesting search phrases you didn’t even input, watering down the results.
I’m a web developer and when I google for “string”, I don’t want to get results for “yarn” to put in a fake extreme example. Rewording my search phrases is one of the worst features they ever introduced. I know what I’m looking for and I don’t need assistance with that.
Google even started ignoring operators sometimes. Back in the good old days you were able to put a word into quotations to tell the engine it must be included in the results. Now when I do this it only mostly works but when they run out of results they just go back to the default behaviour of including everything that might loosely fit the search phrase.
It feels like Google is afraid to show you no results, as if that was a crime or something.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Bing works so much better for me when I look up specific error messages etc.
For my development work, it works fine… haven’t had any issue (but i mainly do a lot of LUA / React). With bing though, a lot of links I got last I tested (a year or so ago) were literally dodgy websites
Bing (and therefore DuckDuckGo, which is what I generally use and is a wrapper around Bing) is definitely worse than Google especially for dev research, but it’s not as good as it used to be.
I do use Google for a lot of my dev research, and they seem to be losing the ongoing war against spamers flooding the internet with garbage content.
Websites like reddit (and beehaw) are somewhat of an oasis – actively moderated with absolute garbage content deleted straight away and questionable content at least has replies where people have pointing out if they think it’s wrong. If (when?) Reddit goes away, that’s a whole bunch of really good content that will suddenly disappear from google results, which will be sad.
PS: If you haven’t already, try buying a subscription to ChatGPT+ and use GPT4 as the first place you go for all your LUA/React questions. I find it gives far better answers than Google for most things. You can sort of dip your toes in the AI waters by trying Bing Chat… but it’s nowhere near as good for code as ChatGPT+.
Google can index other forums, like our own. If Reddit doesn’t want to be indexed by external search engines, then they gotta build their own or be unsearchable. Their existing search is abysmal.
Reddit has been trying to build a usable search since 2008. It’s not happening.
It’s a Lose-Lose situation. Reddit has a fetish for that…
Great time to plug kagi.com
What’s the deal with this whole kagi circlejerk aroumnd here
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
Pro tip: you can use Google’s Verbatim mode to get exactly what you want.
Same but the nihilist in me wants them to do it anyways. Better to rip the bandaid off in one go than to deal with jumping through hoops for several years until they ultimately remove it from Google search anyway. With a clean break, we can start rebuilding that trove of knowledge somewhere else and hopefully not all in one place again.
From people that don’t use Reddit regularly, the only way they have ever heard about it is from Google results. So good luck with unloading a whole clip into your foot guys 🙄
The only time I ever go onto Reddit is when I google something and it leads there
That reminds me. Should make double sure to blank all my comments, just the other day they banned me from another subreddit, seems like some are still re-opening, re-automodding, or whatever.
lol I also just got a shockingly random ban from a sub with a toxic mod. It made me realize what a stupid place it is. I’m pretty much never on there and now that subscriptions for the API are becoming required, I’ll never go on mobile again. It’ll basically be a thing that I just look at in front of a computer periodically
I’ve been googling my old username every now&then, and keep finding comments that the “forget me” tools didn’t delete.
Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything, if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.
On the one hand I really hope this happens. On the other hand, it would be devastating to the communities. But this shows how Reddit has the last say and can hold the content hostage on their platform. People need to stop using Reddit and switch to open and free alternatives, that is not controlled by a single entity / company. The problem is, there is lot of good legacy content and solutions that would be not available for most people searching the web.
Me to my little program for scraping some stories: “Hm, ‘Ignore robots.txt’? Sure, let’s do that by default please :D”
Reddit’s big claim to fame is having results show up in Google searches. Removing it would probably hurt Reddit (and to some extent Google). I’m just hoping that enough content gets indexed by Google for Lemmy and similar sites, as the best content creators don’t just reside on Reddit.
💀
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
The Washington Post reported Friday that Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.
The Washington Post’s report wasn’t just focused on Reddit — it’s about how more than 535 news organizations have opted to block their content from being scraped by companies like OpenAI to help train products such as ChatGPT.
According to the original report, Reddit is in negotiations with AI companies to get them to pay to use its data, and if it couldn’t strike those agreements, it might require logins to see content.
That could have the knock-on effect of preventing Reddit results from showing up in Google searches.
(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.
X, formerly Twitter, has also implemented new pricing tiers for accessing its API, and X owner Elon Musk blamed data scraping by AI startups as a way to justify the reading limits implemented this summer.
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