cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/317922
Alternate title: Google admits Reddit protests make it harder to find helpful search results
“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan reportedly said.
Their search has been getting worse and worse for a long time before the Reddit protest.
“Many of us may wonder,” yep. Some of us are pretty sure it’s because Google is now optimizing searches for profitability rather than relevance. They’re very careful to avoid fully explaining how the algorithm arranges search results, but I think the algorithm now has more financial subroutines than software behind it.
I recently googled “grass” to find out more about different species and the results were all trying to sell me grass.
Grass.
Where I live it’s as common as dirt. I wonder how many people Google the word “grass” with zero qualifiers when trying to BUY grass.
Ffs
“But have you considered special-edition artisanal grass? Guaranteed to impress your neighbors! Practically mows itself! Thrives on zero water! [in small print: made of 100% high grade polypropylene filaments, not suitable for hot climates].” [/s]
For that kind of research, I usually go to Wikipedia, pick a random technical term for the topic I’m looking for, and add that. It doesn’t always work, but it does eliminate some of the sales sites. But it shouldn’t be necessary, sigh.
Ironically, reddit’s search feature was also trash. If I wanted to find something on reddit I just went to google and appended “reddit”.
IIRC, they cited google as a reason not to work on their own search, since that’s what most of their userbase had got used to searching reddit with anyway by that point.
Reddit also cited 3rd party apps, bots and extensions as a reason to not develop many of the features on their own… and here we are now.
I can’t trust a single thing that pops up on google because everything is auto generated blog spam
And regarding reddit, moderation keeps reddit at a good quality but if reddit takes away moderators tools and introduces more instructive ads it will become low quality and untrustworthy as well
Search engines have been becoming increasingly useless for years at this point as SEO gentrification runs rampant and more content moves behind walled gardens like Discord and anything that requires a subscription. Not to mention that Google enshittifies just like everything else. The amount of overly verbose garbage I have to trek through just to not get an answer to my query is far too high. God fucking help us now that AI can generate content, which will be even more garbage to sift through.
We need the AI to sift through the garbage, so we don’t have to
It feels like AI wrote it already. Try googling a windows error now. Instead of getting forums or a blog you get 10 shitty websites with lists of generic fixes that end with them recommending their shitty software that will absolutely not fix your issue.
Google as a search engine is more or less dead. I was only really using Google to search reddit. Now that I’m done with reddit… There goes Google.
Google removing the “do no evil” from their ethos was a very clear indication of the direction they were heading.
“Don’t be evil” is still in Google’s Code of Conduct, it’s just been at the end of the document rather than the start since 2018.
Google did evil shit before and after the change, it’s not quite the big deal that some people make it out to be!
What’s your preferred alternative? I use DuckDuckGo, and it’s… OK. I still often switch over to Google when I’m having a hard time finding relevant results on DDG.
The cynic in me sees a symbiotic relationship between Google and Reddit.
I started messing around on Reddit around 2007, but it felt like a firehose. Google’s results covered what I was looking for to the extent that I didn’t need a second source for most searches, and my job involved reading the AP wire, so I was decently covered on news with additional RSS feeds at home.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m noticing the pattern that most genuinely helpful information is coming from Reddit (as well as no longer being in a newsroom), so I join, and the experience is far better with subreddits (sorry, hipsters). It wasn’t yet readily apparent that Reddit was not only getting better at being comprehensive, but Google was also getting worse.
In the late beforetimes, maybe 2019, Google became useful for searching Reddit and finding product information for items I already knew about. And nothing else. Even with coding questions, there are a lot of red herrings. Without Reddit results, I’d have noticed Google’s search irrelevance far earlier.
I think it’s a bold move for Google to present Perspectives as a new feature to improve user experience when really, it just makes it easier for them to present sponsored content in different formats. Astroturfed advertisments (fake “ordinary customer reviews,” usually) have been a thing on social media for ages, especially on YouTube, and Perspectives is just giving Google a creative way to get eyeballs on those ads.
Using the Reddit implosion as a jumping off point is also clever, and I think it’s evidence that Google doesn’t plan on paying for API access next month, or ever. They don’t want to take advantage of Reddit’s data, they just want to take back the eyeballs that Reddit attracts.
(… not that Reddit was ever immune to astroturfing, of course, but I think strong community moderation made it better than YouTube, which doesn’t give users much opportunity to get rid of fake reviews. Now that they have chased off a lot of mods and nerfed their tools, I expect the authenticity of Reddit product reviews to decrease dramatically).
The article starts with absolute non-news: To get results on reddit.com you should addd
site:reddit.comto your search, not justReddit.Unfortunately, I think this is a disadvantage of the Fediverse when it comes to search: The “site:” operator won’t work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.
Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like
scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search. E.g.DIY Esp8266 camera activator scope:fediverse,scope:lemmyor maybescope:diasporahe “site:” operator won’t work when searching for topics discussed e.g. on Lemmy since there is no common, general domain name.
Agreed, that’s the problem.
Maybe that would be a great next step for a search-engine provider to be better: Add a new, flexible operator, like scope, and index the data of the fediverse or other distributed services for search.
Also agreed, that would be a solution. I’m doubtful wether they deem a particular network important enough to justify the extra effort on their part.
Is it possible to pipe search queries through a website? If yes, then let’s make a
fedi-search! In which you can find any publicly available fediverse content.Would it then be possible to google for
site:fedi-search?
