As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.

I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.

Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.

108 points

It’s positively maddening. Especially since that Spez has turned Reddit into a walled garden experience now, I no longer want to rely on Reddit for answers. Google is just a mess of garbage blogs full of link rotted ‘answers’.

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62 points

All the AI generated websites are driving me insane. They just repeat the same thing over and over again with a bunch of useless text.

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18 points

All the AI generated websites are driving me insane. They just repeat the same thing over and over again with a bunch of useless text.

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20 points

Most of which are AI generated

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12 points

I no longer used reddit daily. But I still use it (without an account) mainly for research. Reddit no longer exists. It’s just a databse of answers like stack overflow to me.

Interestingly I even relay even less and less on searching reddit through google. I use bing ai and bardai since their dataset upadates daily.

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4 points

I don’t have access to Bard (Canada) and I don’t use Bing nor Edge, but ChatGPT is usually pretty good at telling me what to look for or giving me an answer that’s close to the real thing or has the right keywords. However, it’s really often just wrong enough that people replacing a search engine with it and use it for information is kind of worrying…

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1 point
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10 points

Yeah, Duckduckgo, but I find accuracy a bit questionable. It’s not as predictive as Google. If you have suggestions though I’ll def try them.

Apparently Bing is great for porn but I wouldn’t know.

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8 points

DDG is just Bing anyway

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4 points
*

DuckDuckGo is shit. It doesn’t even understand basic syntax like quotes for some reason. I would rather have it only give me a few results to my query as opposed to showing me unrelated nonsense. Through the years I will occasionally try to give it a chance, but I can never find anything useful with it.

Then everyone tells me “well, I just use DuckDuckGo to search Google using !g”. Well what the heck is the point of doing that? Now I have to type two extra characters to search the exact same search engine I was using anyway.

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5 points

Kagi is good but it’s paid

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3 points

There is a new search engine https://trystract.com/ that is in Beta. It is interesting in that it’s open source and has a ‘Discussions’ feature that returns some Lemmy results. As it’s a Beta it’s pretty hit or miss right now.

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2 points
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50 points

Instead of using a search engine or reddit, have you tried asking the real and friendly people here for an answer?

I did this to prove a point. You can check it out, crushed peanut or flaxseed seem popular.

https://lemmy.world/post/4349618

The answers on reddit didn’t magically appear out of thin air. Instead of lamenting about the lack of answers on Lemmy, asking here will get you a good answer real quick.

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34 points

The issue isn’t that reddit has all the answers the issue is that search engines like Google show you the websites that have been best optimized for search engines, not the most helpful ones.

Ending searches with ‘reddit’ works because reddit is the largest group of forums on the web & forums typically are full of people knowledgeable on a specific topic that have good answers.

The quality of returned search results IMO has degraded appreciably. When I search the same question as you posted the entire first page of results is long winded listicals. There’s a lot of seemingly helpful & succinct answers in that post you made but no one searching Google will find it if they enter the exact title.

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12 points

That’s often my issue, forums will have multiple real people with their own opinions based on their experience. With an article it’s one author who is only writing the article to attract clicks.

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2 points

People who write on reddit dont produce the info themselves instead they would have also reffered to some book / article (mostly articles) thus reading the articles will give you more info about the topic … just remember before reading the blog/article see the author and his/her qualification , most articles give a brief info about the writer at the top … just make sure that person is genuinely knowledgeable on the topic … also avoid AI written articles

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2 points

People on forums like Reddit absolutely can produce their own info. Nowadays it’s more often that those articles are based on posts written on sites like reddit.

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0 points

i’m honestly obsessed with how insanely bad it’s gotten. is there a video of the difference? i know for a fact it wasn’t this shitty before, the - sign would work.

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18 points

Fair! But I’m also lamenting about the degradation of search engines as a viable way of finding useful information. Additionally, while I have asked questions on Lemmy before (check my post history), it will sometimes take time to get an answer, and you can’t always be sure how quickly that will happen, if at all (I have seen several unanswered questions on here).

However, I do think that posting the question on here would still have been good for me to do. Not so much so that I could get my answer, but to further engagement and help grow the fediverse.

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13 points

That’s a great option when we have time! But if there’s an issue I need answered within an hour, it’s unlikely it’ll be answered by then.

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1 point

People answered there within the hour…

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8 points

I meant for something more obscure like ‘how to use selection filters for fillet repeats in a less common cad software’. It might take a while before someone comes along who would know.

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3 points

Margot Robbie, most questions won’t be answered nearly that quickly.

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4 points

Is there a way to do a web search on the whole fediverse?

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1 point

With the way federation works it will take some doing, and knowledge of various sites names, but you can do this by adding “source: sitename” to your search

Fediverse is uniquely difficult to do this with though, as traffic is (relatively) low per individual site and you’ll need various names

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1 point

The only things i have found that offer decent search is Lemmy-go https:github.comRaicuparta/lemmy-go/ and Instance assistant
https://lemmy.ca/post/4547927 but they don’t cover the whole fediverse.

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1 point

one of the biggest issues with reddit, imo, is that people would constantly bitch about new / beginner / common / repeated questions, which made it a really hostile environment and unnecessarily harder to get into things. being accepting of those questions is great fodder for discussion, different people to see different answers, more up to date answers, etc. plus it still feels novel here to see posts about things

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32 points

Ugh…I feel this. Recently have been struggling with tennis elbow and without Reddit all I would have had was shitty google web results…blogs, bullshit articles full of clickbait and ads with the same 5 tips. Including reddit I was able to figured out what the actual best information was…without the influence of big media bullshit.

I did check mastodon and Lemmy…nothing really.

The shitty thing is the biggest value reddit has at this point is the years of valuable information WE put into it. Facts and opinions ranked and critiqued and crowdsourced. Our best stories, photos, resources. Despite what people tell themselves, we don’t own any of it. It sucks.

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29 points

It will. I’ve asked stupid questions on here, that I could have gone to Reddit to find the answers for, just to help out with content.

I still use Reddit for movie megathreads. There’s nowhere else on the internet that I’m able to do that yet. And I’d love to start megathreads here, but I’m not capable of handling such responsibility.

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13 points

I will try to do my part and ask some stupid questions as well. I have a whole lifetime of experience in being stupid so it shouldn’t be a problem.

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3 points

Trying to do my part! I’ll try to ask more stupid questions on here. I have plenty of them to ask.

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3 points

Yep I still search Reddit for answers, but I post content and ask questions here. Which is fine IMO, it’s has always been the people that make the good content, not the platform. There were good hardworking people that made those resources, and so it’s ok to use it till those resources move off site.

One issue with Lemmy is the SEO problem. There are a few Lemmy search tools, but simply googling something doesn’t bring up posts like it would with Reddit. It either needs time, or someone will implement a fix in the source code.

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1 point

What does it tske to start a megathread?

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23 points

I agree with the search engine lamenting. In the past I could just paste the terraform resource name in Google and the first hit would be the doc page. Now it doesn’t even deliver me with anything useful 90% of the time.

Google search results really are turning/have turned to s***. Ive gotten better search results out of gpt4 than out of google. And all the “best x” or “best alternatives to y” are just clickbait sites nowadays…

Ironically the web worked better without SEO I guess? Either that or all the content just became rubbish to lure people to add infested clickbait sites harvesting information and serving adds.

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