this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Google is getting a lot worse because of subreddits being private (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by IcyPractice@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.ml
30 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1271267

Source

What do you guys think about this? (Wasn't sure which community to post this in)

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[–] eToThePiIPower@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

One long-term solution would be to ask the relevant question in a relevant community on lemmy every time this happens to you. Then answer it yourself (or wait for other to), perhaps using the other site (via archive.org) as a reference when writing it up.

The important bit is to make sure the answer here is complete and not just a link to outside sources. That way it won't disappear if those other sites go offline.

With enough people doing this we can push lemmy into those search results and build a useful & independent repository of knowledge.

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Great, now Google gets fucked as well! Another win.

[–] DeriHunter@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I don't think you understand, we are the ones who are getting fucked. Search results are getting worse and harder for you to find what you need with all the ads, fake news, sponsored sites, ai generated articles, etc.. Google doesn't care if you find high quality results, they will still gett traffic and their money because people won't just stop using it.

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

  1. Don't use Google.

  2. Learn how to search the internet, its not hard.

  3. Adblock is your friend.

  4. People will stop using it only when it becomes unbearable. Their own business tbh.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit is still one of the best place to find answers by real people because of the disappearance of traditional forums.

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nah, it was.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 year ago

Most of the answers are still there, just behind a locked door. So it will is, for the few who have access.

[–] krevassi@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What search engines you suggest? Duckduckgo is useless for me, but so is google nowadays tbh.

[–] NeXTSTEPER@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Try Searx. It is a free, open source metasearch engine so it gets results from other engines. Albeit much more privately than accessing those services directly.

Searx wiki

[–] Stijn@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like startpage. It's not perfect but works. If I still cant find anything I search google. 95% of the time it just works.

[–] Catweazle@social.vivaldi.net 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@Stijn @krevassi, Startpage is probably one of the best search engines, I used it among others as second of my list, but for first searches I use 2 AI search engines which show me direct answers to complex questions.
https://andisearch.com
https://www.perplexity.ai
and sometimes also
https://you.com

All of these protect privacy and made by small independent startups

[–] Stijn@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks! That looks interesting!

[–] krevassi@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AI search seems like something to dip my toes into. Thanks for the tips.

[–] Catweazle@social.vivaldi.net 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@krevassi @IcyPractice @CookieJarObserver @DeriHunter @Stijn, anyway, don't confuse AI search with AI chats, like ChatGPT, because these have a maybe better Language model, but it's knowledge base is limited (the one of ChatGPT is from 2021), they don't search in the web. Because of this the answers are not reliable or at least outdated.

[–] krevassi@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

@CatWeazle Tried out andi and it is excellent, looked for jobs in my area and it gave me a list of links, all relevant. Also you have an option to only read the linked articles, no need to visit the page so you can bypass gdpr-bs and advertisement. That's going to be bookmarked permanently.

[–] Biscuit@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve replaced probably 70% of my searching with ChatGPT.

[–] CookieJarObserver@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Thats one hell of a bad idea.

[–] Fatalchemist@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Google is already an awful search engine and was most useful only for reddit. Search Engine Optimization killed it.

For example, do you know why every recipe Google shows has a 35 page life story article before the recipe? Because it takes you longer to scroll through the page and find the recipe and see if that's what you want. So Google says oh, this website is good and entertaining and full of so many words! This goes higher up! They don't write the stories because the bloggers care. They write stories because it's the only way to get their website seen on Google.

Meanwhile the website you actually want... The one with a simple recipe and no fluff? Well that's not going to sell itself to the Search Engine Optimization. So it's much further down on the list, several pages down.

The same shitification is happening with every website. Every website is a little bit worse than it has to be simply to optimize it's position on the almighty Google.

When you look for the "top shoes for running" or "best phone of 2023", those are just rushed articles with no research done by people with the sole purpose of pumping out millions of articles just to get some spots on Google.

Google was only good for linking to reddit because reddit could never get their search engine working no matter how many times they tried it.

[–] BlackCoffee@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I've been hearing some good things about Kagi so i have been contemplating to try it.

It is subscription based but still;
If there is a service that serves me as a customer to better my experience using a search engine than I'll gladly pay for it.

[–] privacyn@feddit.it -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There good and sometimes better alternatives to Google, you can easily leave without it or use it only when necessary

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn't solve the issue that the answer you're looking for is on Reddit and isn't accessible anymore...

I mean, good for us for screwing up Reddit, but the transition impacts more than just Reddit itself because subreddits are going private and people are deleting their posts, that's a whole lot of knowledge just disappearing from the internet overnight and that's never a good thing! I don't know how many times I tried to find solutions or answers to tech related questions and the only place I could find an actual answer was on Reddit because it was actual people speaking to each other!

[–] DeriHunter@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, for the short term. But the long term if lemmy can become the successor. It won't be long until it get will get back to normal

[–] CharlesReed@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Not just with subs going private, but with users purging their comments and posts along with their accounts. Just last night I was talking to a friend about something and wanted to pull up a post from a while back. Lo and behold, deleted and gone.

[–] itchy_lizard@feddit.it 3 points 1 year ago

Please post LINKS to Lemmy, not screenshots of headlines. Ffs, even your "source" link goes to an image, not the article

Mods, can we please crack down on this dumb-ification of Lemmy? We're better than tiktok.

[–] ghariksforge@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Reddit was one of the last places on the internet where you could read content without logging in. Almost all of the internet is Dark Web now, inaccessible unless you log in.

[–] angrylittlekitty@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

all attention to this mess is good imho. also remember chat gpt was trained on reddit data i until fall 2021 so should be able to pull on archived zeitgeist for a quick and dirty answer

[–] admin@honeyhive-u4873.vm.elestio.app 1 points 1 year ago

I wonder if they could shift to showing cached versions of pages, so that data is still accessible externally, but you can't interact or get to it from reddit.

[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's temporary until useful info gets posted elsewhere. Besides, Reddit wasn't the only place for good info.

[–] starlinguk@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

It was a terrible place to get info. Most answers were either deleted, someone showing off about the topic but not actually answering the question or OP saying "never mind, I figured it out" and riding off into the sunset.