For quite a long time now when troubleshooting tech issues, I've started searches with site:reddit.com. Hopefully indexing on kbin and lemmy is decent enough going forward that they can pick up the slack. Otherwise, you get a lot of results that are either official tech support forums which always respond with basic troubleshooting, or outside forum posts with no real resolution.
I had to stop and think about this carefully, but I realized that I only used Reddit to find technical answers for personal stuff - like dealing with shenanigans in Windows or problems with games. I work as a DevOps engineer, and when I need to find a technical answers for work Reddit is not usually helpful. I think we'll be fine.
There doesn't appear to be robots.txt restrictions. I can get back results by doing a site:kbin.social search or a site:lemmy.ml search.
I think that a bigger issue is that the fediverse systems are designed to span multiple hosts. There's no convenient syntax to ask Google to search all content on a given fediverse platform, because it spans different domains. Reddit content is on reddit.com, so the site: operator is sufficient.
I think if maybe someone just creates a kbin or lemmy mirror site that all it does is collect data from all the instance for google as well as preserving it in the case an instance goes offline would be a great idea
Since this whole recent dumpster fire with reddit started, that's been the one thing I've been loudly complaining about is the potential or realized plans for some subreddits to move to Discord servers. For informational purposes rather than just acting as a chat platform, Discord is a BAD idea. It essentially adds a walled garden to everything. There's zero discovery by design.
google has been bad for a long, long time. It's no wonder its not functional without reddit. Should be a lesson for all the big companies to not bury communities.
Bing ironically, with it’s new AI interface, is actually rather good now. Still don’t use it though unless I really must, some habits are hard to break.
I agree. For this reason I started branching out to other search engines. My favourite is Kagi. It’s superior to Google in every way, but it requires a subscription. Bing is surprisingly good now, depending on the content. Neeva is an excellent alternative to Google. Yandex for those who would like to avoid American censorship.
That's also what I love. Their focus is on delivering the best quality results, as opposed to delivering the results which pay Google the most.
I also really love that you can block or down-rank domains. Google is RIFE with low quality domains serving terrible results, and they don't offer any way to eliminate them.
Having to add "reddit" to search terms was a sign of a problem in my opinion.
Either the search was broken because non-reddit results were trash 8/10 times or straight forward quality answers just weren't a thing elsewhere. So much spammy articles or long winded articles without that reddit filter. Questionable reviews for products or recommendations too. And that is without considering chatgbt fueled spam.
oh god searching for something like "windows random bluescreen" is filled with stupid results. Reddit was the only source for good information with people asking questions with similar terms
kinda think we need a search engine that can index fedirated sites . like lemmy /mastedon /pleroma .etc .etc
searching for help with technical /specific things has become a nightmare .as al the usefull subreddits have gone dark due to the ongoing protest . making google not so helpfull at all to use
I've made a bad habit of attaching the word "reddit" to the end of too many of my searches even for questions that I should be looking for their answers in trusted sources instead of taking answers from random redditors the blackout has helped a little with avoiding that.
Also, I find that basically every search result that isn't reddit is sponsored content.
Search something real specific like "Best aftermarket injector coils for a 2009 Toyota Corolla" and you're going to get 100% advertisements and listicles for search results, likely written by somebody who doesn't know shit about cars.
Append "reddit" to that search, and you'll be led to a post from a car mechanic giving their opinion on the matter. And, well, I do trust a random stranger on the internet more than I do an advertisement.
Agreed. But it's a nice reminder that these huge companies that get money by renting out our eyeballs actually provide very little content - just the platform we happen to be stuck with for the time being.
I've actively found this as well but honestly, I think it's for the best because most of the time Reddit posts with actual answers aren't well-cited. So if anyone asks how you know something, "uhh Reddit told me" is pretty weak. So Google is getting better because Reddit has gotten worse. It means that you have to go to the actual articles and find the actual sources instead of this daisy chain of information. We have a huge issue with misinformation and this actually helps resolve it.
All the stuff i would use reddit as an actual source for is things where it's either obvious that the person is wrong or easy to check or think through. Same for lemmy
We have a huge issue with misinformation and this actually helps resolve it.
I'm not really sure about that. Bad SEO is something that still exists, and with huge sites like Reddit gone, the bad SEO sites become more prominent which is not necessarily the site with actual articles and sources.
Of course the solution to this is not reddit back but stopping SEO and having better curation of sites in search engines somehow.
Wait you use reddit posts to inform yourself on things where misinformation is possible? I also was mildy inconvenienced by the blackouts but it was mostly related to programming stuff, where it is very obvious if an answer is wrong. I don't think I would even consider using reddit as a source for anything factual
I work as a game developer and a programmer. There are a lot of possibility for people to be wrong. Specially when it comes to design or usage. A lot of misinformation in programming is like yeah this answer technically since this specific case but when you scale it, it breaks entirely. Like https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/stealth-based-mechanics/6992/6 is a great example where yeah a trace will work, your data will be inaccurate a bit, you won't be able to scale it and it won't work with a lot of edge case lighting. The better solution is to use a grey colored mesh and a scene capture to get information consistently about both the baked and dynamic lighting. You might even have a better way though like getting the data from lumen or shadow maps.
So even with things you think won't have misinformation, you get misinformation and people guessing while presenting they are right.
Makes me want to go back and edit my posts to f*** /u/spez because I don't want them getting traffic off of my content. But also don't want that entire collection of human data gone if everyone did the same.
Too bad we can't all export and reconstruct our conversations here somehow.
My posts are 99% shitposts anyway, so it doesn't really matter, nothing constructive to mankind.
Use a tool to edit all your comments to a Lorem ipsum, the more useless data they have filling their database the better, I prefer this to simply deleting them all and freeing up their database storage.
Btw, I don't know any tool for that, but I guess there should be some because I saw some users editing all their comments.
Never heard about Kagi before, thanks for mentioning it! How is your experience with it? I tried DuckDuckGo for a while and wasn't to happy about it. Is it comparable?
The federated nature of instances unfortunately might nerf the SEO because they're from different domains. Google wouldn't value instance_1. com more because the clicks to related_instance_2. com are higher.
I thought links between domains helped pagerank score? Mind you, it's been a while since I learned SEO. A lot of the content, especially the federated stuff, seems to be loaded via javascript. I wonder if that affects what can be indexed.
If it's done right, it's still indexable because in the first render the content is delivered with HTML. On subsequent clicks, the browser fetches via JavaScript, but the URL in the browser still changes and if you refresh, the page is fetched containing the content again.
That's important not only for search engines, but also for screen readers, fast rendering and devises without JavaScript. I think Google is totally able to index JavaScript generated content, but pages will get a higher rank if it's done in an accessible way.
I think it's more appropriate to say that internet searches in general had been getting worse over the last several years, but it just so happened to be the case that your answer could likely be found in a reddit thread.
For many people google (or whatever engine) was just a gateway to get informations on reddit. With all those sub reddits down at the moment, a lot of searches are really hard to get informations, because like it, or not, reddit is a big part of getting informations or opinions etc.
I'm not sure what to think about the price. I can't really imagine life without a search engine, even though I was alive for a couple of decades before search engines existed. I pay $400/month for my car, but my search engine arguably gives me more value (I am lucky not to need to drive a lot). I wouldn't pay $400/month for a search engine. But $5-10 to have a degree of freedom from the tracking and results that aren't just trying to get my money? I am intrigued.
I was amped for Kagi when I first heard about it. But they bumped the price up after the LMM boom. Still might have to bite the bullet as part of desire to use paid ad-free services.
Depending on how much you use it, it might not be that much worse though... The old price was 10$/mo for unlimited searches. Now they offer different tiers starting at 5$/mo for 300 searches.
Personally, I use about 300-500 searches per month, so my monthly bill is actually less than it used to be (5-7$).
Add comment