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
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.
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.
I’ve never used the official app. I’ve seen screenshots of it.
The search functionality shouldn’t be tied to the app, though. It’s done server-side.
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.
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.
That sounds like something someone who has never tried to use reddit’s own search would say.
I don’t think they can.
Reddit who?
Yeah that’s a bluff. Google searches surely make up a huge portion of their traffic.
💀
Does Reddit not realise that their own internal search is so bad most people will search for answers on Reddit via Google. They’re gonna shoot themselves hard-core in thd foot pulling that move.
And vice versa! Google search results are so terrible, but if you add “reddit” to the end you get a relevant community with a conversation almost always addressing literally the exact question you have. Both are pretty useless by theirselves (is that a word?) now, but together they’re actually really powerful. What a dumb move.
*themselves.
I must’ve been having a serious brain fart lol
Heh, it happens to the best of us.
From people that don’t use Reddit regularly, the only way they have ever heard about it is from Google results. So good luck with unloading a whole clip into your foot guys 🙄
They’re going for the tommygun-barrelmag combo to ensure there’s nothing left of that damn foot, then cry for sympathy money.
Fuck you Spez.
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…
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there was definitely a time where i got some results from google in a very ad-like manner, super fucking annoying: “you may like this…” and spamming different search terms, locations etc.
i haven’t seen it since, i figured they were A/B testing the design
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.
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Bing (and therefore DuckDuckGo, which is what I generally use and is a wrapper around Bing) is definitely worse than Google especially for dev research, but it’s not as good as it used to be.
I do use Google for a lot of my dev research, and they seem to be losing the ongoing war against spamers flooding the internet with garbage content.
Websites like reddit (and beehaw) are somewhat of an oasis – actively moderated with absolute garbage content deleted straight away and questionable content at least has replies where people have pointing out if they think it’s wrong. If (when?) Reddit goes away, that’s a whole bunch of really good content that will suddenly disappear from google results, which will be sad.
PS: If you haven’t already, try buying a subscription to ChatGPT+ and use GPT4 as the first place you go for all your LUA/React questions. I find it gives far better answers than Google for most things. You can sort of dip your toes in the AI waters by trying Bing Chat… but it’s nowhere near as good for code as ChatGPT+.
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Great time to plug kagi.com
I’ve been using SearXNG locally to query many free engines at no cost to me.
SearXNG
that’s awesome. Is the quality good? I’m really loving Kagi, but I love OSS stuff so might consider this. Maintenance is also an issue. I’m tired of maintaining things. I’ve got my own unraid server, pihole, etc and I’m not in the mood for adding more stuff.
What’s the deal with this whole kagi circlejerk aroumnd here
you should try using it. Seriously. I thought the same as you, “why are all these people plugging kagi so hard”. Well, I literally started using it 3 months ago and I’ve only used Google search 3 times since then and not a single one of those times did Google succeed at the search I needed either. Google was so fucking bad that I essentially was forced to make a change, and I’d tried DDG like 2 years ago and hated it, I tried Bing and hated it.
I fucking love not being tracked, not worrying about being the product. I can search what I want without fear of being watched. It’s fantastic. And it’s fucking better than Google. God, google has gotten so bad I literally had trouble doing my job some days. No more of that bullshit.
Pro tip: you can use Google’s Verbatim mode to get exactly what you want.
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.
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.
Great overview of the issue
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
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.
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…
Pretty sure those are not AI generated.
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.
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.
You aren’t alone. I stopped posting to Reddit in the protest and haven’t posted/voted since, but old threads are just too useful to completely block it out.
The thing is, though, my Reddit usage from Google Search hasn’t replaced what used to be my time browsing Reddit. I now exclusively use it for informational old threads via Google Search.
If before API terms changes I spent 7 hours a week on Reddit, and let’s say 5% of that was needing Google search results from Reddit specifically and the other 95% of usage was scrolling through my Reddit front page; I am not now spending 7 hours on Reddit via Google search. I’m now only using that 5% of 7 hours/week = 21 minutes/week on Reddit, and maybe even less considering my newfound aversion to the website.
And I suspect that most of the people who stopped using Reddit after the changes—whether by lapse or by principle—are not gonna come crawling back to it if Reddit chooses to sever that tenuous metaphoric link.
Edit: clarified a subject
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.
Oh no that is a very bad idea. Google search is the only way to find things on reddit
Duckduckgo
Fog, DuckDuckGo is bonkers useless for Reddit search
Search query site:reddit.com has entered the chatNever had an issue, but I guess to each their own
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.
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.
That reminds me. Should make double sure to blank all my comments, just the other day they banned me from another subreddit, seems like some are still re-opening, re-automodding, or whatever.
lol I also just got a shockingly random ban from a sub with a toxic mod. It made me realize what a stupid place it is. I’m pretty much never on there and now that subscriptions for the API are becoming required, I’ll never go on mobile again. It’ll basically be a thing that I just look at in front of a computer periodically
I’ve been googling my old username every now&then, and keep finding comments that the “forget me” tools didn’t delete.
The only time I ever go onto Reddit is when I google something and it leads there
While Reddit is atrocious without Google, Google is my Reddit search engine, given how its algo is gamed. I miss the day when I could get more than 50 pages of results and still found something useful from some really obscure sites. Now it just stops you after a few pages.
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”
