• Smacks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Literally the one reason I still use Reddit is because appending site:reddit.com gives me actual results. Reddits’ built-in search results are utter dog shit and you cant find anything. They’d just be shooting themselves in the foot for blocking Google

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Literally the only reason why I still bump into Reddit even when I’m not trying to.

      Here’s an example from real life. When I searched for “ipados brave yutube ads adblock”, I found some Reddit posts discussing the issue.

      Spoiler: Ditch brave and switch to something else.

      BTW, Reddit is currently in the “hold my beer” sort of state when it comes to shooting itself in the foot.

      • bcron@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think in Reddit’s case, mostly due to the garbage search function, they’re stuck deciding between shooting themselves in the foot right now by blocking Google, or allowing generative AI to shoot them in the foot later by allowing Google to scrape user content. There will soon come a day when less people use Google to find specific information on Reddit and more people ask an AI prompt and get the same information fed to them without having to click through to Reddit.

        I think the most ideal way to coexist with AI is for Reddit to pull out of search engines and make their own search engine work well, but until then they’re in a pickle

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          I think you’re right. Reddit is in a really tough spot now that we’re living the early days of AI. IMO Reddit should make their own LLM and call it Snoo or something. This way, people could asks Snoo to solve all their tech issues.

          • bcron@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Quora did something similar to that. On mobile it’ll pester you to download the app, and on the app it’ll pester you to download an AI app, in an attempt to keep people bouncing around between those 2 apps.

            Quora seems to suffer from the same issue as Reddit. AI can take a single page view and distribute the information obtained from that single page view multiple times, basically cut out the source in terms of monetization, and those 2 sites benefit the most from people using Google to find something. I think Quora’s approach is a bit more sensible than Reddit’s, basically jumping on the AI bandwagon as opposed to cutting off both AI and people using Google

          • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            And that’s on a good day. Can you imagine how my spelling looks like in the morning before having coffee and/or when I’m standing in a train during the rush hour? It’s so far from human readable, that I’m inclined to call it a type of encryption.

            • mbfalzar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 year ago

              Let’s run this through one word at a time

              ipados - name of a product, trademarked, spelled correctly

              brave - normal English word, spelled correctly

              yutube - missing the letter “o”

              ads - normal English word, spelled correctly

              adblock - name of a product, spelled correctly. Not an extension available for the browser in question as far as I can tell, but that’s the kind of thing you find out when you google it

    • Nahdahar@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Search results have gone to shit since everyone and their mothers started doing this SEO-optimization bullcrap. Google obviously has no reason to fix this situation because it makes them more money when people spend more time looking for something. site:reddit.com was one of the mitigators for this problem…

      I’d gladly ditch search altogether and use ChatGPT + browsing support, but that’s similarly dogshit because it’s working off of SEO-optimized bullcrap results too.

      • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        SEO should have been immediately dealt with years ago by having search engines permanently blacklist domains that pull that shit, no questions asked.