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.
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
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that lays the golden eggs, they can still sell access to their existing forum archives for AI training, but those have been archived and are downloadable online, at least up until early in this year.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure most of those are not AI generated (yet…).
They pay humans $2 an hour to write a paragraph ten different ways, then mix those with other paragraphs written by other people to create huge “content farms” of sites full of ads.
And they are deliberately shit - because they depend on visitors giving up and deciding to click an ad instead of whatever they came to the site for.
Though I admit, I’m already there extremely rarely.
I always experience an onosecond after accidentally clicking on a Reddit thread in the search results. Followed by a short wave of disgust by the often mean/negative comments and pressing Mouse 4/Back.
Wait, I just realized I can block reddit.com completely in kagi. 10$/month nicely spent; begone thot!
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
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.
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.
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.
You aren’t alone. I stopped posting to Reddit in the protest and haven’t posted/voted since, but old threads are just too useful to completely block it out.
The thing is, though, my Reddit usage from Google Search hasn’t replaced what used to be my time browsing Reddit. I now exclusively use it for informational old threads via Google Search.
If before API terms changes I spent 7 hours a week on Reddit, and let’s say 5% of that was needing Google search results from Reddit specifically and the other 95% of usage was scrolling through my Reddit front page; I am not now spending 7 hours on Reddit via Google search. I’m now only using that 5% of 7 hours/week = 21 minutes/week on Reddit, and maybe even less considering my newfound aversion to the website.
And I suspect that most of the people who stopped using Reddit after the changes—whether by lapse or by principle—are not gonna come crawling back to it if Reddit chooses to sever that tenuous metaphoric link.
Edit: clarified a subject
Literally the single prominent technical problem that has spanned Reddit’s entire life is the lack of a decent search engine. In general, people fell back to Google because Reddit’s was abysmal.
So is Reddit gonna finally build something decent? Because if they don’t let Google index them, and they disabled Pushshift access, it’s gonna be hard to search the content.
I doubt Reddit builds a decent search engine, that doesn’t actually help them at all.
If users can search, they find a previous post pertaining to what they want to see/know and they move on.
If there’s no search, users can’t find old posts or comments so they make new posts about a previously posted topic and more comments are made as other users react. That’s more content, even if low quality from a user perspective, that shows engagement which can be sold to advertisers.
That’s before considering the engineering effort it takes to make a good search engine, constantly fine tune that algorithm, and try to outpace those that are trying to game the search algorithm.
Did they improve their app after shutting down third party apps? I honestly don’t know but I’m thinking no and no to improving their search function.
Nope. I tried as a stopgap solution and it’s basically unusable. Literally unusable: sometimes after opening it from a deeplink from Google, the app can’t launch even after a force stop. It goes to a splash screen and calls itself “Popular” instead of Reddit, and the splash icon is some random community or user icon, and then crashes to home screen. No clearing cache gets you out of it, gotta clear data and sign in again. Not to mention, the horrible lag and slughishness.
They can’t fix theirs so instead of competing fairly, they shut down the API so you have no other option.
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.
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.
I don’t think DDG runs its own indexer. It’s a frontend to other search engines.
that’s literally the only reason i still end up visiting the site after I left it
That sounds like something someone who has never tried to use reddit’s own search would say.
