• j4yt33@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      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that lays the golden eggs, they can still sell access to their existing forum archives for AI training, but those have been archived and are downloadable online, at least up until early in this year.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.

    • Auzy@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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

      • lichtmetzger@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.