That sounds like something someone who has never tried to use reddit’s own search would say.
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.
over Facebook et al.
Public Facebook posts are indexed in Google. I think public groups are too. There’s just so much content (given how much larger Facebook is) that I doubt Google actually indexes every single public post.
Duckduckgo
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.
Right; they mostly use Bing. Bing is the largest search engine that has an official API, so the majority of services that need search functionality use it, including voice assistants like Siri and Bixby, smaller search engines like DuckDuckGo, etc.
Well, that depends on how they implement the block, if its by domain or a blanket block (which would make sense, but I’ve seen weirder shit done online)
Fog, DuckDuckGo is bonkers useless for Reddit search
Never had an issue, but I guess to each their own
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
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
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
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.
Pro tip: you can use Google’s Verbatim mode to get exactly what you want.
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 $2 an hour to write a paragraph ten different ways, then mix those with other paragraphs written by other people to create huge “content farms” of sites full of ads.
And they are deliberately shit - because they depend on visitors giving up and deciding to click an ad instead of whatever they came to the site for.
New here? Japanese website have been mostly like that for decades now.
I haven’t used Japanese websites enough to be able to provide a comparison.
It definitely wasn’t the situation for English-based websites five years back. It was an issue at the beginning of this year. I don’t know where it really started.
I started noticing it about a year and a half ago…
Though I admit, I’m already there extremely rarely.
I always experience an onosecond after accidentally clicking on a Reddit thread in the search results. Followed by a short wave of disgust by the often mean/negative comments and pressing Mouse 4/Back.
Wait, I just realized I can block reddit.com completely in kagi. 10$/month nicely spent; begone thot!
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
Looks nice, but for me features like fastgpt are worth the 10$/month
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.
I’m guessing with the API dead it’s the only way to find content on Reddit anymore, too. I can’t imagine the Reddit searches that worked weren’t using the API, and Reddit’s search is a dumpster fire.
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.
Seriously. Searching google with
site:reddit.comis a thing for a reason. Their on site search is atrocious.
Reddit’s big claim to fame is having results show up in Google searches. Removing it would probably hurt Reddit (and to some extent Google). I’m just hoping that enough content gets indexed by Google for Lemmy and similar sites, as the best content creators don’t just reside on Reddit.
that’s literally the only reason i still end up visiting the site after I left it
Same, sometimes Google sends me to Reddit, it’s the only visits they get from me
I don’t think they can.
Reddit commits suicide, more at 11.
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.
The only time I ever go onto Reddit is when I google something and it leads there
Dear Investors to Reddit’s upcoming IPO
We have been making some exciting changes to ready the company for our public offering. Please read on for the exciting details.
First, we want to reassure investors that we’ve worked hard since June, 2023 to alienate our most active users, who have been cluttering Reddit with non-profitable, straightforward discussion and help for years, and ensure that users cannot access our platform with reliable, convenient smartphone apps.
And we know it’s not enough to merely insult the people who have donated substantial parts of their lives to make our platform valuable; we’re also planning for the future. As you may have recently heard, we’re introducing a system to directly pay users who reliably produce the most attention-grabbing clickbait content. We are confident this will ensure that if those long-time users ever feel like returning, they will only find a hellscape of low-effort, reheated viral content and memes, accompanied by consistent, reliable comment sections of karma-farming bots and users.
But there’s more! We today announce that search engine users eventually will not be able to locate anything on the site, consistent with the existing experience for current on-site Reddit users. We know that a curated, managed experience is what most reliably leads to happy investors, so rest assured, we will be slowly cutting off all avenues for users to direct their own experience on Reddit. Yay!
As the IPO day nears, remember: when we are finished only the worst content will be available by an audience who can’t find us. Our core audience will be the users who remain trapped, Clockwork Orange-style, in an endless cycle of stimulation triggers structured to maximize ad viewing, in order to ensure our investors capture the maximum proportion of the site’s rapidly diminishing value. In other words, get ready to maximize ARPU, investors!
With these changes, invest with confidence. With geniuses like us at the helm, you can be sure line goes up.
You know what depresses me the most about the current world situation? That it might be go well after all anyway
Long live daddy Spez. Well said, looking forward to the IPO based on this.
Weirdly, I read this as “Reddit doesn’t think it needs search engines,” and was confused about seeing everyone discussing Google specifically. That’s a bit stupid to try to block only the one search engine.
I see a lot of the Kagi shills crawling out of the woodwork here. I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
Just my two cents, but I think it’s okay to suggest both. Everyone is capable of doing their own research and deciding for themselves what they like and don’t like. I’ve never heard of SearXNG, but it looks really cool. May spin one up for myself.
I don’t recommend Kagi because it lacks privacy and you have to pay for it.
It lacks privacy because you’re required to log in AND pay for it. Logins enhance the chance your queries are logged; and providing payment information is a good way for law enforcement to obtain your identity; even when you’ve done nothing illegal. If you don’t believe me just look up how Geofence Warrants work in America and how they’ve backfired in some cases.
If a company as big as Google complies with Geofence warrants; Kagi has no chance at all in resisting them, even when they’re issued in an illegal and unconstitutional manner.
Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything, if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.
On the one hand I really hope this happens. On the other hand, it would be devastating to the communities. But this shows how Reddit has the last say and can hold the content hostage on their platform. People need to stop using Reddit and switch to open and free alternatives, that is not controlled by a single entity / company. The problem is, there is lot of good legacy content and solutions that would be not available for most people searching the web.
But for the search engines who do not respect robot files, would still be able to index. Right? Ironically an AI could also write summaries…
Me to my little program for scraping some stories: “Hm, ‘Ignore robots.txt’? Sure, let’s do that by default please :D”
Am I the only one that regularly used “search phrase site:reddit.com” on Google? It makes the search engine so much better.
Really bad idea to get rid of this feature.
Whelp with that I guess my leaving Reddit will go from 99% to 100%. Literally the only reason I’ve ever on that site is because I have a Google search result now. It was the last useful thing about it. Google has terrible results now and Reddit search is useless. They only work when together.
I will believe that Google can figure out a way to filter the spam – I mean, beating the spammers was their core value-add that made them what they are today. The spammers have pulled well ahead for maybe a year, but Google can maybe figure out a way to pull ahead again.
But there is no way that Reddit is going to be a reasonable forum site without a way to search it. Maybe it doesn’t have to be Google, but they have to have something sane.
Even aside from people searching, some people contribute specifically so that the information they provide can be found by people searching down the line. If it’s just going to a black hole…
I just don’t think Google cares anymore. They don’t have any legitimate competition. Their web browser dominates, their search is literally a verb now, and nobody’s changing anytime soon. The search has been terrible for a solid two years now and I just don’t see it getting any better. They have incentivized an entire industry designed to push low effort noise to the top for over a decade. It would take an unbelievable amount of work and dismantling said industry, or at least heavily augmenting it, to right the ship again.
What’s a “good” search engine these days?
Kagi.
Beyond not using reddit, and only landing on reddit when a search engine leads me to it directly, I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
None, to be honest. Google had the best 3-5 years ago. Downhill currently. I use DDG for privacy and just have to work a little harder to find what I want.
There’s one paid one I’ve seen people on HN recommend but it seems pretty fringe and more about being open source than being as good as google. Supposedly decent though. Can’t remember the name unfortunately.
Kagi is probably the paid one you have seen but it’s not open source. And it’s way better results. I make maybe 1 extra search for every 30 searches now compared to google where it was getting up to 3-5 extra searches every time I did a single search. Not sure of a better metric other than that.
Appreciate the info!
