If google results didn’t become total garbage, people wouldn’t need to append reddit to searches, I hope google knows that as well.
I don’t really think it’s Googles fault that the internet is mostly garbage.
They’re convenient scapegoat, but they’re essentially a phone book.
It’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem. But I’m leaning towards Google in this case.
Google is an advertising company. They get paid to show certain results higher, while balancing relevant results by the number of visits and matching key phrases. This is essentially what SEO is.
There are reports of people having to create a separate website designed for SEO, filled with buzzwords and useless fluff, just to show up on searches. It’s a combination of bots, LLM, SEO, and '00s/'10s tech companies actually needing to make money that leads to screwing over the user and their experience to squeeze more profits.
I think this is a very accurate description of the problem. A company can do anything for money, and we feel those effects in the declining quality of search results as everyone dances to the repetitive tunes of SEO. It could be possible to persuade Google to adopt and apply better Internet ethics, but I feel like moving away from large companies like Google and adopt other alternatives is the best solution altogether. Just cut it from the root.
Except it is, they used to have a good quality crawler that didn’t prioritize machine-generated SEO slop from content farms. Within the first page and without adding terms like
site:reddit.com,-site:pinterest.com -site:quora.comorbefore:2016you could easily get what you wanted.While this is technically true to what google was originally designed for, it does not represent reality as it exists today. Sites can, and do specifically cater towards SEO. In particular almost any index-able site specifically gets designed to be put at the front. Not only that but many sites will actually PAY to show up as an ad when their competitors names are searched. As a result you end up with a system that only rewards players who follow a very specific set of rules. Rules which are inherently optimized for ad revenue on google’s part
source: have been working in tech for 5+ years
The situation with high quality search results becoming inaccessible reminds me of what happened with expertsexchange back in the day. EE adopted a pay wall and in doing so sequestered a bunch of useful technical answers. Their greed turned against them and opened the way for StackOverflow to really take off and gain dominance.
expert sex change
I want one of those. 😔🏳️⚧️
you win the internet
I’ll take “the rapists” for $200.
penisland.net therapistfinder.ca
and the fourth one from that segment of QI which I can’t recall atm ; edit: it was whorepresents.com
I remember that, lol for a LONG time you could just use Google cache and bypass the paywall lmfao.
Don’t know when it changed but it doesn’t work anymore :(
Whenever I have a tech problem, I add reddit to google search. That’s the only way to get good answers from google. This worked great until their API scam.
After switching to the fediverse, I should also replace Google. But with what?
I switched to Duckduckgo recently. So far it works good and gives me helpful results. Can’t give long time Test results, using it since a week. But I think it gets the job done.
I was very happy am that Apple added it as a default option in iOS. I had been using it off and on for years but now it’s been my default in various browsers for I guess about 3-4 years. Generally I find what I want with no problem, but still need to append !g and get the results from Google for some searches. Maybe about 10%, and more often on image searches.
That is really good to hear! I also added it as default search engine in safari and brave since I switched. Thought I have to go full in in order to give it a chance. Where exactly do you add the „!g“?
Anywhere in the search string works, and then it redirects you to google.
Oh, and the feature is called “bangs”. I knew there were a good handful of them but apparently there are a ton! Over 13,000?
The “!g” is part of something called “bangs” on DuckDuckGo. Bangs are prefixes to redirect your query to another search engine. For example “!g How to pet a cat” will redirect you to Google, searching for “How to pet a cat”
Other useful bangs are “!m” for maps, “!gi” for Google images, “!so” for stack overflow.
You can find more about it at the bangs page: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Been using it exclusively for years with no issues.
Same, I’ve never found it to be significantly worse than google except in AI-aided features like Reverse Image Search.
After switching to the fediverse, I should also replace Google.
Not necessarily. One step to a better internet at a time. Sometimes people get overwhelmed by free software solutions because they try to do everything at once.
But with what?
I’ve tried a lot but replacing google search is not easy. You can of course use a meta search engine like searx which is great but then you hand your search traffic directly to some random instance owner. You could also use startpage which is basically a firewall for google search. duckduckgo does work and I use it sometimes but the search results are definitely worse than google’s. The bangs are a nice feature though.
I was using ddg for a while but got fed up with the kinda shit results… swapped over to brave search and it seems much better, but not 100% sure if it’s got the privacy behind it like ddg does… have you got any experience with brave search?
No never used it. But now I got curious.
I think DuckDuckGo has gotten way better, and Google has gotten way worse. I tend to use DG for most search needs and then append !g to go to Google if the search doesn’t meet my needs.
I’m thinking of giving Ecosia another go, since I really appreciate their whole “use the whole net income to plant trees” thing. Just gotta check out how well their algorithm does at this point.
CHATGPT, although it sometimes lie so need to take it with a grain of salt
chatgpt will make up believable bs on spot if you ask it about anything remotely obscure
It is slightly confusing to me why everyone was insisting ChatGPT was a threat to Google and that it would replace Google search. They don’t seem like comparable products.
If you imagine users asking questions to Google just to recieve a bunch of crappy listicles or the wiki page, versus ChatGPT, it makes more sense.
ChatGPT enables you to have a dialogue to ask follow up questions, more detail or summarize information in two sentences. Google can’t compete with that using a page-rank algorithm alone. It is incredibly powerful and it’s getting exponentially better.
I’d caution anyone who just dismisses it by calling it a chatbot or says it hallucinates too much. I found the accuracy between 3.5 to 4 pretty astonishing to the point where I now fear the AGI apocalypse.
Honestly for certain things that I was already knowledgable about, it provided a really great and accurate summary when I asked. Other times not so much, so I don’t feel comfortable using it for research like that.
I think if it could base its output on real sources and direct you to them it would be a bit better
It can help, but it’s data is sometimes too old.
LLMs are far better at writing things that look like answers than they are at writing actual answers.
Hah. Imagine if you went to Wikipedia and had to account for that 40% of all info on there was straight made up. Like the Scots wikipedia.
I had over the years posted thousands of answers to question to Python, C#, AngularJS, Angular and React questions. I wiped all of them with shreddit the last couple of days. To give you an idea I have been running it for 2 days over seperate accounts and its still not done.
Reddit respawns deleted posts. Go and sue them!
I’ve been slowly amending my most like comments (leaving the most downvoted). Yet to see any come back, maybe Reddit didn’t value my top notch sarcasm Vs helping people with actually problems.
Reddit hasn’t restored any of my comments, either. Not sure if I should feel insulted or not.
So adding the word Reddit to a search query counts as a hack?
Guess I‘m somewhat of a hacker myself.
Depends on your definition of what a hacker is, Hollywood version or techie version
The best hacker is of course the one who can guess the password the fastest (all-lowercase, dictionary word).
That’s easy, its ********
Oh I had no idea it would star out your password. Let me try mine too!
hunter1
I ran across Thurgo yesterday just browsing casually. Apprently he’s on the lemmy bus too!
Two hackers, one keyboard.
holy shit, that was the worst thing I’ve ever seen on TV. I feel like the writers have a competition to make the WORST tech faux pas in TV History
We’re all on a watchlist now. I’m now sat here in complete paranoia, nibbling at my finger nails just waiting for the doorbell to ring. I already know my face is up on the whiteboard, strings attaching me to reddit, pornhub and the pirate ship.
They’re coming, I know it.
Ah yes the “search term” + “reddit” trick, works every time. At least it used to…
I haven’t looked into it yet, but I’m hoping there’s a way to add default search parameters when searching via Google/Bing/whatever. I just want to add “-site:Reddit.com” and just never see reddit search results again. It’ll suck for niche topics, but I don’t want to be giving them any of my traffic.
Is there already an alternative to search lemmy/fediverse via google like we all used to do with reddit? e.g. site:<fediverse>
Do we even need this? Or could a search engine be a part of the fediverse, that we use instead of google?
That’s definitely doable, probably more doable than the regular web
so much for finding an answer to a question only 5 people have ever thought to ask
Uh, it’s not a “reddit hack”, it’s a documented feature of Google Search – limiting results to ones from a certain domain. You can use
site:<domain.tld>for anything Google indexes.It’s particularly useful for finding immediate links to obscure parts of government websites or, say, looking through old press statements.
You can also use
inurl:to find results whose URL contains the string that follows. There’s all sorts of interesting things you can do to narrow results from Google, most of it is surprisingly intuitive. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?sjid=15038670024975993899-NAIt also demonstrates just how useless Google’s search has become that it’s widely known to use Reddit to cut through all the SEO spam.
