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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Technology
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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
It's a Lose-Lose situation. Reddit has a fetish for that...
Google can index other forums, like our own. Or stuff like Wikipedia. If Reddit doesn't want to be indexed by external search engines, then they gotta build their own or be unsearchable. Their existing search system is abysmal.
Reddit becoming unsearchable would really damage their usability as a forum site.
You can say that even if Reddit's value as a forum falls off, they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, they can still sell access to their existing forum archives for AI training, but those have been archived and are downloadable online, at least up until early in this year. I mean, there are gonna be companies running AIs trained on that in jurisdictions that Reddit cannot sue them in and don't care about honoring US IP rights, like Russia.
Reddit has been trying to build a usable search since 2008. It's not happening.
Great time to plug kagi.com
What's the deal with this whole kagi circlejerk aroumnd here
you should try using it. Seriously. I thought the same as you, "why are all these people plugging kagi so hard". Well, I literally started using it 3 months ago and I've only used Google search 3 times since then and not a single one of those times did Google succeed at the search I needed either. Google was so fucking bad that I essentially was forced to make a change, and I'd tried DDG like 2 years ago and hated it, I tried Bing and hated it.
I fucking love not being tracked, not worrying about being the product. I can search what I want without fear of being watched. It's fantastic. And it's fucking better than Google. God, google has gotten so bad I literally had trouble doing my job some days. No more of that bullshit.
I've been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
that's awesome. Is the quality good? I'm really loving Kagi, but I love OSS stuff so might consider this. Maintenance is also an issue. I'm tired of maintaining things. I've got my own unraid server, pihole, etc and I'm not in the mood for adding more stuff.
Pro tip: you can use Google's Verbatim mode to get exactly what you want.
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
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+.
I actually use Copilot mainly these days tbh for a lot of things
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