Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
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.
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.
undefined> 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.
Not to mention the removal of dislikes on Youtube, which makes it even HARDER to find quality tutorial type videos
First we ditched Twitter for Mastodon, now we’re ditching Reddit for Lemmy, and sooner or later we’ll be ditching Youtube for Peertube.
Ever since dislikes were removed I use a plugin that shows the ratio of likes to views to determine if a video is worth watching.
Most of the time if the likes to views is >= 2% then it’s an okay vid.
I have been using GPT4 as a Google replacement and it’s been working out fairly well.
Google is completely useless for finding anything organically now.
The last couple of times I’ve had to phone shop have been a nightmare of SEO-keyword articles and promoted junk.
If it keeps up this way, we’re going to be completely dependent on AI to sift through the junk for us.
That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.
I haven’t been able to find anything good on there in years. Everything is some company claiming to have a fix and it’s just stupid crap that isn’t helpful. ‘Here’s 10 tips to fix your issue that are worthless.’
I’m in the process of repairing my entry way guard rail. I did a Google search for marking banister placement with curved railing. Google’s attempt to be useful was to to search for “baluster” instead of “banister”. It’s a complete fucking joke.
And forbid searching for vehicle tire size suggestions if you’ve ever done a single search bikes. Finding recommended tire size for 17x8 wheels is fuck all impossible. After the first 10 links I start getting links to Bicycle shops in the UK. While I’m located in the US.
Also is it just me, or did search engines (not just Google) suddenly start disregarding quotation marks a year or so ago? I’ve been adding quotes to tell the stupid thing “no, I really did mean that weird word you think is a typo” and lately it just fucking auto-incorrects it anyway!
How to fix your tech problem:
- restart
- the same generic fix you already saw on the last 10 websites that didn’t work
- download our totally legit software that’s specially designed to fix this exact issue
The biggest problem is that if you want to find info on a particular subject matter, be it something niche or not, there’s no dedicated place to find discussions on it unless you already know of specific forums where you can mine for info. That’s the real value that Reddit brought to the table.
If you know exactly what you want and the perfect key words you can usually get it to show up on the first page as long as you’re willing to scroll. Compared to its peak of “have a vague idea and we’ll find it” it’s really sad
It’s amazing how crappy the internet has gotten over the last decade or so. Yes, before that was the blogspam and link hijackers, but those were real problems that search engines were actively cracking down on via their Spam teams.
In the meantime, the relevance teams took a break and started trusting their social signals too much - now we’ve built an internet which incentivizes popularity over accuracy and has done so for a long time. Used to be that I could find things on Google and, if I couldn’t, I knew the advanced search tools to tailor the search and get where I needed. Now, I just add “site:reddit.com” to the query. But if the niche communities die, that’s a lot of knowledge that just vanishes.
Unfortunately many users have abandoned and deleted their accounts, rather than maintain control and authority over their posts.
So when reddit restores their comments, in spite of the fact this contradicts reddit’s own terms and conditions as well as Californian and European law, users won’t realise this.
I used the power delete suite to leave a nice explanation of Lemmy and ways how to migrate as well as a last happy fuck u/Spez on my main account.
My NSFW account has an even more elegant solution: Each and every post or link was edited to a highlight reel of the 2 girls 1 cup video, with no warning whatsoever.
Both accounts have been abandoned in this state, good luck restoring the OG content.
Keep checking, see what happens
Although I suspect edits are less likely to be restored than edits+deletions, or even edits alone.
Certainly, I’ve had a couple comments that I manually edited that have stayed, while a few others have popped back up.
But so far, comments that I have edited and deleted from the source URL have stayed down. It’s only the edits from the profile (using PowerDeleteSuite) where some have come back. Granted, most were old, now I’m getting info the recent ones they’ve been lingering on.
I still have a good 28,000 out of 76,000 lines to get through though from my original CSV file. I will make sure they’re all processed before 1 July, and if reddit restores any of them I’ll have logs to show their violation.
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?
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.
I’m using startpage.com for a few months now, I’m surprisingly quite happy with the quality of search results.
DDG has also become bad unfortunately. I used to add -site for quora and pinterest. But for some odd reason now a days it fails most of the time. Which has made the results very similar to Google. Plus they were always horrible at local search, atleast for most of the places where I lived.
https://search.brave.com/goggles - Is an interesting way of searching. But I just started using it recently. So still not sure about it.
https://kagi.com/ - Seems to be pretty decent, but it is paid.
But I am still searching. None of them seem to match old google. But that might be because the internet has changed with most of the actually useful information walled up.
Not sure i like metered searches… and $25/month seems steep for unlimited.
But i will try this out, i would gladly pay for actually good search. Maybe keep google for simple web navigation then the $5 tier kagi for more nuanced search, should keep under the 300 search limit with that approach
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.
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.
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.
If AI art is just ripping off IRL artists than it’s safe to assume chat GPT’s training was >50% reddit & Wikipedia content.
That would explain why it’s all written like wiki content edited by a redditor.
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
