The default subreddits are really horrible.  Reddit is still okay if you unsubscribe from all of those and only subscribe to the narrow subreddits that you&#x27;re interested in.  Of course, it&#x27;s hard to find new subreddits that way.

Something as simple as subsubreddits would solve this. I.e. a &quot;funny&quot; subfolder or something, like proper forums are organized in different sections. But Reddit want a eternal feed to show as much ads as possible. Low quality posts makes them money since you have to scroll by them and thus sees more ads.

You might be lucky and there is a subreddit for your favorite topic that has very strict rules about memes or lazy content. I wish more subeditors would encourage lazy content  or have a &quot;fork&quot; with such rules.

I thought reddit died when people started posting those image memes.

Embedded search in arbitrary web sites sucks because it&#x27;s a hard problem. The naive solution is to put all text in a database table keyed by &quot;page&quot; and do a sql &quot;like&quot; query. Don&#x27;t ever do this. Some db&#x27;s have full text search nowadays. I&#x27;ve implemented &quot;embedded&quot; search a few times in the past and I used Lucene, which actually works pretty well.

You can add !g to a DDG search and it will pull from Google. I&#x27;d say the quality of DDG is slightly less than that of Google, but not so often that sometimes having to !g the search is an appreciable problem. I&#x27;ve heard people say that DDG just uses Bing, but I&#x27;m not entirely sure how true that is.The general problem with all search engines is that the moving target of the search algorithm often doesn&#x27;t move fast enough anymore, and there&#x27;s so much data that you&#x27;re virtually guaranteed to have an overwhelming amount of wildly off-topic results. SEO farming has significantly damaged the utility of search engines, too. Finding obscure material is difficult because keywords are swamped, and it&#x27;s exacerbated by the fact that the overwhelming use of search engines is for common URL lookup or to replace whatever invariably godawful embedded search a website might have. It&#x27;s mostly DNS for people rather than a tool to actually search the web.Speaking of, why is embedded search so invariably godawful? It&#x27;s really quite impressive how useless it usually is.

Although it&#x27;s true that google results for subreddit in the specialty I&#x27;m looking for are (to me) top results (because I know I&#x27;ll probably read from knowledged people on what I&#x27;m looking for), most of my queries are more about general trivia and other stuff that no platform like reddit can really encompass better than google it self.I pretty much throw everything at google (like grammar, quotes, places, trivia in general, tech questions - reddit still isn&#x27;t as good as stack-overflow for developers), Brave browser will take the ads out, and I get to choose my result. It&#x27;s quite a nice experience.(And no, I don&#x27;t recommend Duck Duck Go either. It fails to show obvious results every now and then. I learned that the hard way.)

They sift thru that and give about what you want. I just tried it - &#x27;modelling clay&#x27;. Google&#x27;s 3rd page (after many paid ads) has what DDG has on top after a disambiguating a&#x2F;b&#x2F;c box to help you know what you&#x27;re looking at.

I still find that DDG&#x27;s programming related results are limited and often resort to using the Google command to find what DDG couldn&#x27;t.

DDG isn&#x27;t perfect or anything, but whenever I check on Google after searching DDG, the results on Google are never better than DDG any more.

You don&#x27;t have anywhere near the disposable funds that would be required to &quot;grep the web&quot; on your behalf.

I know normal people would never use it but I sorely wish there was a way for me to just grep the web instead of using &quot;search&quot; as offered by Google et al.

&gt;The web is still young and no one really knows what it will be in the future.My fear is that walled gardens might win in the future because who guarantees you that websites won&#x27;t move to Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Slack and Discord channels etc. Open web is weaker than ever just look at LinkedIn; walled garden, throws you Register form in the face when you try to access it and won&#x27;t let anybody crawl or scrape their content except Google who drives more traffic to their walled garden.

&gt; We&#x27;re back to the Web needing a search engine.I feel like that this has not changed the last 20 years. Yes - google was at some point like a miracle that seemed to solve lots of problems around searching the www for information.While google &quot;refined&quot; its search and monetarized it the web still evolved and is evolving to something.. different. Many of websites most people already know, competing around google top rankings and ad revenue; there are even people dedicated to &quot;make $website more visible to the web (what they really mean is google)&quot; for lots of money while the real internet goes on in the background.We need more ways to search the web. We need lots of different search engines that are competing and working together also. The web is still young and no one really knows what it will be in the future. (I fear it has to do with ads. Lots. Of. Ads)

&gt; Google search is good for discoverability if you&#x27;re new to the web I guess?This is almost certainly not true. I don&#x27;t think kids (who make up the vast majority of &#x27;new to the web&#x27;) care about using Google for discoverability. They&#x27;ll use YouTube, Twitch and Instagram to find things they care about. Google is for answering questions, not finding new things.And honestly, it&#x27;s not generally that good at answering questions.Source: my 10-year old.

It&#x27;s much easier to type &quot;searchterm&quot; or &quot;searchterm wiki&quot; in your web browser address bar and then click through to the Wikipedia result than it is to first navigate to every individual site and use their non-standard search bar.

Wikipedia is the perfect contrast to google search results.- It contains 100% signal- no noise- and provides helpful related links if you need more information.- Pages are organized and brutalist.- Every page has a steward who (thanklessly) keeps the information accurate, up-to-date, and ad-free.Contrast this to Google:- 50-100% noise (depending on the query; more information requires more queries and therefore less signal)- SERP pages are disorganized and absolutely riddled with UX dark patterns (modals, banners, autoplaying video, etc). Many pages with good info are over-styled&#x2F;over-javascripted&#x2F;over-languaged, and finding the one or two sentences you&#x27;re looking for is a chore.- One-off SEO spam plagues everything; ads and affiliate links are pervasive. Stewardship is a waste of time.

&gt; I&#x27;ll go to respected online stores... such as? The only general-purpose online store available to me is Amazon as far as I know, and I certainly wouldn&#x27;t call them respected.

&gt;If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and use their search.Wikiepedia is a very good resource for a lot of things, and a good jumping off point, but you shouldn&#x27;t assume that you are getting &quot;factual information&quot;, especially when it comes to hot button social or geopolitical issues.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.craigmurray.org.uk&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-philip-cross-affair&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.craigmurray.org.uk&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-philip-c...</a>

Am I the only one who just skips the search engines and go straight to the source? If I want factual information, I just go to Wikipedia and use their search. If I want to shop I&#x27;ll go to respected online stores and again use their inbuilt search feature.Obviously I&#x27;ve just built up a list of good sites in my head which I trust... Google search is good for discoverability if you&#x27;re new to the web I guess? Although in the old days that&#x27;s what web directories where good for:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_web_directories" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_web_directories</a>

The Kagi founder just posted this to Twitter, which illustrates what I was saying perfectly:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;vladquant&#x2F;status&#x2F;1494076266508537858" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;vladquant&#x2F;status&#x2F;1494076266508537858</a>

I&#x27;ve found Brave Search[1] and Kagi Search[2] to be great alternatives to Google. I know exactly the sort of thing you&#x27;re describing and both of them are a breath of fresh air in the space.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;search.brave.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;search.brave.com&#x2F;</a>
[2] Beta at the moment - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kagi.com&#x2F;</a>

Usually I&#x27;ve search for &quot;gemology terms&quot; or &quot;gem cut types&quot; first then I&#x27;ve mix and match those keyword until I get desired result

That was the craziest part to me. I was interested in both products and information, and despite deciding it was a good idea to show me almost nothing but ads, they didn&#x27;t manage to show me anything worth clicking for either purpose. I was practically their ideal target for getting someone to click an ad on purpose, and they still dropped the ball.

They have the buyer ready to buy and still missed the sale because they wanted to make a profit on ads. How ironic. And this kind of experience probably turns a lot of buyers off from using Google search.We don&#x27;t need your unrelated ads, we already know what to buy, don&#x27;t patronize us. We need help getting to the product page from keywords. We need real reviews. We need a shopping experience we can trust.

Could you clarify what you mean by 90% ads? I would assume there are always organic results right after the top 2-3 ads, has this changed somehow?Also you say the results were &quot;all from different sites&quot;. Is that a good or a bad thing? I imagine having too many results from the same site would be less informative, no?I&#x27;m very curious to try the same search query myself, but of course I understand that it may not be something you&#x27;d want to share.

Some objects are more difficult to find but I use Google lens to find products all the time assuming I have a picture.

Google&#x27;s ideal would be that every single search result would be both relevant and an ad. And it&#x27;s going there, somewhat at least. Because the people who have the most time to write articles are employees writing&#x2F;researching 8h a day. Someone doing it on their free time has no chance of competing. The problem is that obviously the people paid to write are biased. In some cases maybe it&#x27;s a problem, in others maybe not.

The other day I was searching for a specific kind of jewelry and realized I don&#x27;t know of a search engine that can do what I needed, which is to just find good results for my search. Searches for jewelry-related keywords triggered Google to go 90+% ads, and their results (and other search engines&#x27; results) were so junked up with spam and the same couple sites over and over that they were useless.We&#x27;re back to the Web needing a search engine.[EDIT] I should add that the ads Google was showing me didn&#x27;t even do a very good job of showing me the very specific kind of thing I was looking for, even though there must be thousands of stores around the world selling pieces that fit the keywords. The ads were for jewelry, but most of them weren&#x27;t anything like what I was trying to find. In this case an entire page of ads but all from different sites and mostly the thing I was looking for would have been better than nothing, but it couldn&#x27;t even do that.

Right. Feels like it&#x27;s optimized for common voice queries, in sentence form. They&#x27;ve sacrificed technical&#x2F;HN users to focus on this.

Yep. How many bug reports are useful vs how many are &quot;the button didn&#x27;t work&quot;?Google is optimizing for that.

This is very helpful if I search for a name I didn&#x27;t quite pick up or don&#x27;t know how to spell, or if I only remember fragments of a quote or topic, then I just blurt out my stream of consciousness and Google will mostly point me in the right direction. That being said, I wish I could explicitly tell Google to treat my query more literally. Ideally you would be able specify the search query in some kind of grammar. They have these kinds of prompt mechanics for GPT3, so I doesn&#x27;t seem too unrealistic, even if it&#x27;s all ML nowadays.

Tons of people don&#x27;t, thoughDo they? I see this stated all the time, with no references.They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the waterPerhaps if Google didn&#x27;t try to fix things for people, they would be more thoughtful with their searches.Take away the junk food, and people will resort to real food. The same way some cities limit parking at big events so that people have to take mass transit. It&#x27;s for their own good, but they have to be shown the way.Google has optimized for working &#x27;most of the time&#x27; for &#x27;the most peopleThis may be Google&#x27;s goal, but it hasn&#x27;t happened yet.I don&#x27;t have very many friends or acquaintances in the tech bubble, so I base my observations around real people in the real world. More and more they&#x27;re giving up on Google entirely.Their primary search engines these days seem to be Instagram, Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, and other non-Google sources.When I ask someone why they&#x27;re searching Amazon reviews for tech support information, they tell me because it&#x27;s not on the web. That&#x27;s Google&#x27;s failure.

Here&#x27;s a perfect example of this phenomenon.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;wwMY3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;wwMY3</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=how+old+is+linux&amp;oq=how+old+is+linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=how+old+is+linux&amp;oq=how+old+...</a>

That&#x27;s like speaking to little children, that are learning to talk, reproducing their errors. Some adults believe that it&#x27;s cute, but it&#x27;s idiotic, confuses the babies and make their progress more difficult and slow.

A single mediocre experience optimized to work ‘most of the time’ for ‘most people’ is quite contrary to the narrative that has made Google such tremendous amounts of money (“let us surveil you so that you can have a more personalized experience”) though, isn’t it?Given all of the data collected about Google users, ought not one of the applications of that data be some way to give users specifically what they are searching for if their past behavior suggests that they mean what they type? Couldn’t the “search only for &lt;exact query&gt;“ option be a very good data point on making that determination automatically, or enabling a user setting for “give me exact results based on what I actually typed by default”?It seems possible to me that this behavior has more to do with the value of ads for “big” keywords than with (poorly) inferring user intent.

Google has optimized to whatever sequence of behaviors achieves the most profit. The search results are not chosen for utility to the user but as nudges in a cycle of influence intended to drive you to attend to an ad, purchase something, or consume particular content.They should not be engaged in non-consensual manipulation of social or political behaviors, and the ethics of market manipulation at scale through advertisement are far from clear.

Right, although piping junk into the search box and expecting it to bring back something useful is trained behavior.I&#x27;ve been using DuckDuckGo a lot more recently and the thing that surprises me isn&#x27;t the kind and quality of the results, it&#x27;s that I actually need to use my brain to search.It&#x27;s not about whether this is a good or a bad thing—I kind of like the precision in a way, it&#x27;s just jarring how different it is as an experience.

But isn&#x27;t Google supposed to know everything about us by now? Surely they know who types correct search queries and who keeps making typos?

I honestly find it pretty helpful.  You can type &quot;russian murder painting&quot; into Google and it will come up with Ivan the Terrible and His Son.  All that hinting may be annoying if you know exactly what you wanted, but I&#x27;m not a specialist in everything I ever search for.

This used to be solved by allowing queries like `Class Inheritance +ruby&#x27; to require results to include &quot;ruby&quot;. They killed this for Google+ by changing it to quotes, so `Class Inheritance &quot;ruby&quot;&#x27; but now they interpret even those. When I use Google, which is less and less, I am not looking for a fight with a computer to express my intent, I&#x27;m looking for the answer to a question. That never seemed to be an issue until recently.

No, because they broke quotes. That&#x27;s going out of the way to try and tell me what I think.

I see what you are saying but it seems to me that it used to do a much better job at that. These days I feel like I&#x27;m fighting the search engine constantly and it is certainly not magically finding what I want anymore. It feels like some crusty unmaintained tool that I have to know how to use.

A less charitable interpretation --- and unfortunately one that could be true --- is that Google does not want you to think. It wants to keep you stupid because it&#x27;s easier to deceive those who can&#x27;t think and bend their thoughts in the direction that gives G more $$$. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s not merely optimising for the stupid; it&#x27;s actively encouraging it. It wants to be your brain, control your thoughts and life.

It&#x27;s funny to observe my stepson learning his way through Google. It&#x27;s happening mostly through the assistants on TVs and locked cellphones. But he&#x27;s learning to do exactly what you said: half-second thoughts and brute forcing many queries for the same subject. He&#x27;s 7.

&gt; This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.Tons of people don&#x27;t, though. They type whatever unprocessed half-second thought they have into Google and expect Google to lead them to the water, even if they&#x27;re tugging and trying to go in the completely wrong direction. Google has optimized for working &#x27;most of the time&#x27; for &#x27;the most people&#x27;, and that means striving for fixing the complete word soup of search results people type in.

I did software dev at a marketing firm for about a year, and it was pretty soul sucking, so I know what you mean. I won&#x27;t work at one again unless it&#x27;s literally my only option.

Working at a marketing agency, I can promise you the Dead Internet Theory really isn&#x27;t even a conspiracy. It&#x27;s depressing.

Its not about reddit as a search, it&#x27;s about using reddit to validate your search because the alternative would likely yield poor results. You could trust the 10 listacles that came up as the first results that all look oddly similar, or you can try and filter through reddit by including it in your search terms

reddit&#x27;s search isn&#x27;t that helpful though. I often get to reddit from Google, sometimes I even do site:reddit.com, but still using Google&#x27;s search.

Regardless of automation, there will always be jobs that are so &quot;dumb&quot; but still expensive to automate that people can do cheaper then machines.

Classic example of this kind of content... Try searching &quot;How to use X to get stains out of Y&quot;.You will find a page for almost any X and Y combination. And they will all have wording like &quot;Put some X on the stained Y... wait a bit... rub it in... and then put it through the washing machine. Hope it works!&quot;.

How can you be sure that you&#x27;re not a bot?

Article agrees:&gt; Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.Fake plastic trees.

That job is probably months away from being automated by GPT-3 and its ilk, supposing it hasn&#x27;t yet been.Right now, I don&#x27;t think you can tell it to use some specific terms in the text it generates, but it doesn&#x27;t sound like a difficult extension.

Speaking of bots, I&#x27;d be interested to know the percentage of articles on major traffic content sites are authored or co-authored by AI.My suspicion is this is rife given how many articles read poorly and are almost entirely fluff. If this is true it would appear we are doomed to algorithms shaping our online experiences, which is worrying given the existing shrinking diversity of opinion and content. It&#x27;s like a entropic gene pool in nature, but with information.

&gt;&gt; This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we&#x27;re far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work.It may be becoming borderline. I expect that sentence&#x2F;paragraph completion is already becoming useful to people who churn out quick content for a living. In any case, the important part isn&#x27;t whether or not it&#x27;s bots. The important part is whether or not it&#x27;s authentic. The precise meaning of authenticity gets squishy, but it exists nonetheless.IMO the sentiments are correct, whatever the details. Part of why google sucks is that the internet is worse, for a bunch of the things we use google to search for. The internet becoming a larger, more profitable industry changed it. Instagramming for influencer perks, SEOing, or selling targeted ads like FB do... it does not lead to the same places that earlier iterations of the WWW produced. Times change.

The other day I looked up the wordle answer (I know I know). The first result was a site where I had to scroll through about 19 paragraphs of SEO vomit to get to the answer. The page could literally have one word on it and serve it&#x27;s purpose. If that isn&#x27;t a sign that the the internet, or at least google search, is dead, I don&#x27;t know what is.

My friend briefly had a copywriting job writing weed strain descriptions for dispensaries. He was never provided the product he was describing, just told to make it up.

Lately, half the results I get are pages that I cant view without paying to some service or signing up for a free trial.. Google literally serves up results that are unreachable ..

Bloomberg and other news orgs publish bot-assisted articles, for example to summarize financial reports the moment they appear.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;1EjSu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.fo&#x2F;1EjSu</a>

I would expect an automaton to be able to spell; so perhaps the presence of spelling errors is a mark of an authentic page. Maybe one could force Goo to spit out authentic results by including a strategically-misspelled word in the search terms.

About the &quot;dead internet conspiracy&quot; - I&#x27;ve worked in writing how-to articles for a fairly large &quot;help&quot; website. They paid very little attention to the quality of the articles. I was paid for each piece and thus had about 30 minutes to write an article and later integrate feedback from internal review. Otherwise the payment became too low.The most important factor was cramming SEO terms and links to keep people on the website into the articles.The result is trashy articles that could well have been written by a bot but aren&#x27;t. This could possibly be done with the help of curated bot-content, but I think we&#x27;re far away from the point where this is really more profitable than getting students to do the work.It&#x27;s people but they work like bots.

StackExchange is better for an informed discussion. Reddit has become too much like Yahoo! Answers.

Great take on the topic. I completely agree, love the small communities that form in Reddit and there I can find the experts to ask.

The only real advantage of reddit is that somebody will usually be insulting the ad account, so you can hopefully glean some truth from the insults.

Yeah, a lot of subreddits are clogged with the same bad info that&#x27;s gotten all over Google&#x27;s front page.  The stickied &quot;list of recommendations&quot; on an enthusiast sub is just the same as you&#x27;d get from clicking the top result of &quot;Best X 2022&quot; on Google, complete with affiliate links

Use &quot;&lt;search term&gt; site:reddit.com&quot;. That will exclusively restrict you to results from reddit.

I, too, search &quot;&lt;search term&gt; + reddit&quot; often for product reviews and such. Thing is, the results on that front have started to slide as the paid review side of the internet catches on. I&#x27;m finding that it&#x27;s getting harder and harder to trust the reddit search results - lots of shill accounts and obvious junk. That&#x27;s not a google problem, specifically, but it&#x27;s another degradation of a workaround for declining search result quality :(

Reddit&#x27;s search engine is kind of crap (not terrible, but also not great). That&#x27;s why I use Google for Reddit, to have a better Reddit search experience.I figured that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s so high, is Reddit&#x27;s UX keeps slowly getting worse so the best way to find stuff on Reddit is by searching outside of it.

There’s something sad and ironic about using Google to search Reddit. One, I mostly dislike using Reddit - I only want to see specific discussions very occasionally. Two, what is the state of the internet if I have to use the best search engine to find content on a website I mostly dislike? Haha.

I like this conspiracy theory<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phantom_time_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phantom_time_hypothesis</a>

When I&#x27;m looking into some project or piece of software I&#x27;m unfamiliar with, I really do search for HN posts on it. Fastest way to cut through (enough) of the biased material and get something genuine. Even hyped stuff usually has enough contrarian posts to give you an idea of where to look for the skeletons.

Me too I even have a bookmarklet in Firefox so that I can use a prefix (hn) and the search is rewritten as site:news.ycombinator.com, to make sure all results are limited to HN.I also have the same kind of bookmarklet for Reddit and Google Scholar.

&gt; - &quot;Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.&quot;Haha, the noobs. I use HN instead sunglasses cool faceA bit more seriously: I fully agree with this. And if HN doesn&#x27;t have what I&#x27;m looking for then I use Reddit as well. But if HN has some info on the topic with a few highly upvoted threads, damn, it always impresses me.

I find the idea that banning Trump supporters killed reddit to be pretty far-fetched.To the extent there is a change in quality, it probably comes from other factors, including having a bigger, broader, and different user base now than in the past (and only a small portion of that change likely came from Trump-related bans).

With quality comes success.  With success comes popularity.  With popularity comes idiots.

I dunno, looking at the growth curve in Paul Graham’s tweet I expect most of the drop in average comment quality can be attributed to the size of the user base. It’s hard to keep high-quality content the norm even in much smaller communities.&#x2F;r&#x2F;nfl had a reputation for high-quality content and wasn’t a particular battleground in the Trump Wars. It’s still a good breaking news feed, and the live game threads are fun, but every post is dominated by joke comments and memes.

Quality on any non niche popular subreddits were already abysmal long before 2015. Reddit is useless for anything which is not highly specific but there are some diamonds in the rough: great subreddits exists about fashion, knives, gardening, coffee, shaving and plenty of other weird interests.

Searching Reddit helps but the quality of comments has gotten lower since 2015 or so. It seems to coincide with the wave of subreddit bans and the nakedly politically-driven moderation on subreddits. And with the reflexive attitude—against anything countering the Reddit consensus—that developed during the Trump years. High quality posters seem to have withdrawn from the site (at least in how much they comment) and what&#x27;s left is mostly ignorant teenagers and bitter millennials with shitty jobs. In turn, that crowd is much less likely to upvote high-quality thoughtful content, so the cycle continues. The decline in quality has trickled even into the less popular subs. Don&#x27;t get me wrong, the site has always had problems, but the more recent decline in thoughtfulness is dramatic.The worst part is that despite Reddit getting so much worse, there is no other place that&#x27;s grown to fill the void. This place is great, and I do search HN when it makes sense, but it&#x27;s small and narrow in scope. Reddit basically crowds out any competing websites by sucking up all the low-level chatter required to sustain a community, but has also pushed away high-quality posters, who now have no place to go. Very tragic but maybe a good case study in shitty network effects.

Is Google unique in that, though? Amazon reviews are worthless now because companies pay customers to leave positive reviews or pay review farms to leave positive reviews. Even if someone reports them to Amazon, though, the companies just close their accounts and open new ones with different names and sell the same product. It&#x27;s so trivial for them to pivot when they get caught that I&#x27;m not sure there is a solution to this problem.

Reddit does have astroturfing, but a lot of communities are aggressive about identifying and banning shills, so it&#x27;s not as widespread as in google search results.

There have been some great posts and comments today regarding online content manipulation and censorship

Another factor that isn&#x27;t being fully accounted for is a new SEO&#x2F;marketing technique where many people are asking scripted questions publicly on sites like reddit and then stealthily providing answers that market a product or service. This leads to reddit results not being exactly authentic as well. Pretty much most online reviews cannot be trusted as we are begged to do positive reviews of companies (and when companies outright purchase positive reviews, which is also very rampant) also as a factor.Though Google is at fault for letting their service falter to the &quot;payola&quot; race, many other factors are in play all across the Internet since data quality has faltered almost totally. For major-cost and non-refundable purchases I need to trust, I go to brick and mortar stores and inspect what I am buying. I am thankful not everything has shifted to an online-only model. It&#x27;s going to be a very bumpy ride on the Internet until Congress and consumer protection laws wake TF up and do their job.

Based on some of the April Fools&#x27; Day experiments that Reddit has done in the past, I&#x27;m not sure why you wouldn&#x27;t have the same hesitation and mistrust of Reddit posts and comments. So much of the content, even on Reddit, is made by bots or copied by bots from older, legitimate user-generated content.

&gt; This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren&#x27;t trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads.So are reddit-comments and entries. There it&#x27;s even worse, because most people don&#x27;t connect the content with manipulation.&gt; The &quot;best&quot; recipe for pancakes is only what&#x27;s trending on instagram right now.So, like reddit? I mean every platform has their hive mind, and reddit is even worse, because the hive mind can be manipulated with paid upvotes, not just reposting and comments.&gt; The same for trending programmer tools.Aren&#x27;t most of them yet again commercial products from companies?

I&#x27;ve been adding this to my searches for years. Check out this site that will save you a few keystrokes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gooreddit.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gooreddit.com&#x2F;</a>

Yeah, Fextralife saved my ass multiple times while working through the dark souls series. It&#x27;s a shame that type of community resource isn&#x27;t more popular.

Totally agree on the reddit point, I&#x27;ve also noticed the same occurring to me. The girlfriend recently got Pokemon Arceus and sometimes asks me to Google something she wants to know.It&#x27;s completely pointless, you just get a bunch of articles from news sites (??) that transcript the quest but not tell you anything more. I miss a nice community wiki like I&#x27;m used to from playing Dark Souls etc.I&#x27;ve just started appending site:reddit.com to everything, works a lot better.

I view the Dead Internet Theory as Black Mirror style satire. All it would take is liberal application of GPT-3 style transformer AI to content generation and much of the Internet could be fake. You could have fake political trolls arguing with other fake political trolls from the other side, fake blogs, fake review sites, etc. and it would take me a while to notice. Most of the modern Internet is just that bad.Advertising always creates perverse incentives. It works in traditional media too. Look at what happened to things like Discovery and The Learning Channel when they became subject to advertising based pressure for ratings. They went from having actual educational content to being full of tabloid trash.

I agree that Reddit remains a good source for info, but I’ve found that Google usually does a good job surfacing Reddit results — usually in the top half. Though this is most notable when I’m googling for esoteric info about TV shows and video games (e.g. “best build mass effect 3”)

I didn’t really even think about this properly until just now.. these days I am looking at Reddit, Facebook groups and if needs be, YouTube (videos not by ‘creators’ as far as possible) to find information I used to google. Ads and referral links have totally ruined the usefulness of so much information.

But I still prefer to use Google to search Reddit or Stack overflow.Reddit especially has horrible search.

&gt;&gt;- &quot;Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant&quot; ...&quot;&gt;This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.It should do both. And it used to do both.

The first review site I go to, to find if the product should be trusted or not is reddit only in the hope that not every comment is a paid ad.

Moderators that are often anonymous&#x2F;unknown.(This isn&#x27;t an argument against your point, just a bit of additional context that increasingly is odd to me as Reddit gains more and more social weight)

The reason that the quality on Reddit is higher is because there’s people moderating those quality subreddits. Without those moderators it would all turn to crap and be just as useless as Google.

The latter feeling may be because HN is run by a startup accelerator. They run literal native ads on the front page whenna startup they sponsor goes live.

That inauthenticity comment really hit home for me, too. I realize that I do not trust the internet at large, and haven&#x27;t for a long time. That&#x27;s been the real trigger for my retreat from mass social media into smaller, tigher online communities.Even HN is starting to feel like it wants to sell me something.

They were acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.

They have filed for an IPO last month with the SEC so they should go public very soon.Last valuation was at 10b$ which is ridiculous for a website that can literally get its most popular subreddits shutdown arbitrarily whenever a small group of extremely online volunteer mods decide to &quot;go on strike&quot; by locking the subs because they don&#x27;t like something&#x2F;someone else on the website.It happened before and the admins yielded to them so I don&#x27;t see why it wouldn&#x27;t happen again, especially since it&#x27;s not like they can run the website without that weird cabal of (mostly delusional&#x2F;psychotic) power mods doing their work for free.

Any idea what reddit&#x27;s valuation is currently looking like?I have long been surprised they havent been acquired .. I assume for sure they have had plenty of offerss in the past

Except Wikipedia has a reliable place on the page, if a Wikipedia entry exists... they never _removed_ it, just _moved_ it.This is the least of the issues with Google.

As soon as Google removed Wikipedia as the first result of everything they started dying.

Feature, not bug. If there&#x27;s no public search, it can&#x27;t be gamed for money. The problem TFA identifies is one of discerning that the person you&#x27;re getting your info from is an actual person, who cares. The best way of doing that, until we find some way of creating institutional trust in these matters, is talking to the sort of person that spends all day in talking to a chat room about whatever it is you&#x27;re asking about.

It&#x27;s because private communities are the only ones free from mass abuse. Public forums moved to private discord groups with hard to find invite links &#x2F; etc because public forums take an army of anti abuse workers to keep alive. While a discord group just needs a few people to kick the trouble makers and maybe revoke the invite link for a while.

&gt; Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly accessible online discussions.There are still some pretty active enthusiast message boards, e.g., <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tacomaworld.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tacomaworld.com</a>But your overall point is valid, I think. My pointing to a single active forum doesn&#x27;t change the fact that many of other enthusiast groups have moved to facebook groups and the like.

IMHO it&#x27;s not so much of a problem with google search, but the internet as a whole.Most genuine discussions have moved from open, publicly accessible web to places inaccessible to search engines and general public. Smaller niche forums, blogs and personal websites with no financial incentive have died out. People have moved to Facebook, Discord, Whatsapp, Instagram, Slack, Twitter and other places behind logins. Online newspapers and portals are increasingly using paywalls. Most of the genuine human interactions and quality content is not indexable anymore. Instead we have a million affiliate marketers fighting for the top positions in search results with every possible seo trick.Reddit is one of the last places with huge amounts of publicly accessible online discussions.

&gt; how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers?You have to reify &quot;trust&quot; into concrete, computer-representable data. Maybe borrow the &quot;web of trust&quot; concept from PGP, but do some sort of multiplicative thing where the amount you trust someone&#x27;s recommendation online is the product of the trust relationships between you and the recommender. That&#x27;s really the best you can do - even legislation against online advertising will be subverted by companies that go through layers of proxies to buy influence.

A factor in there has got to be &#x27;who pays?&#x27; If it&#x27;s hostile to advertisers, then there&#x27;s got to be money to pay for the infrastructure from somewhere.Maybe a tax on ISPs? I think I&#x27;d happily pay $10 extra per month for access to an ad-free interrnet. Maybe $20. But how many of the people that are already happy with the ads and poor google results would do so? Would it be sustainable?

One small thought — having the search engine be configurable, so that the user can specify which sources to give priority to (e.g., Reddit, NYT Wirecutter, Wikipedia, etc.), would be an incremental improvement.

I &quot;search&quot; reddit a lot, but all my searches are always through Google. Reddit search is notoriously bad, even after multiple attempts by them to fix it. Suffixing my Google searches with &quot;reddit&quot; though gives all the results I&#x27;m looking for.

I too have found myself searching more in Reddit. Not to throw shade on Reddit, but even if I find exactly what I’m looking for in there, it’s depressing that it’s all bound up inside of another walled garden who will eventually have the same incentive as Google: squeeze every last advertising dollar out of the produc… I mean users. Like Google, it’s just a matter of time before they too lose their balance.A question worth posing to this community: how can we build an internet that’s hostile to advertisers? Secondarily, how can said internet also be much more accessible to content authors so they won’t have to learn a css, html, and JS to publish some stuff? Finally, how can that content be discovered from within this network?

&gt;Reviews are secretly paid ads.So are a lot of Reddit comments.

&gt; This is it for me exactly.This is for me exactly too. Search &quot;best XXX for YYY&quot;, and I get back two pages of dubious websites that smell like paid ads a mile away.

&gt;Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling.I increasingly think that upvote&#x2F;downvote culture is the worst thing to happen to the internet and the world at large.The problem is I don&#x27;t have an alternative solution to propose.Your comment is spot-on in my opinion though - I usually start with Reddit results, but try to check against other sources before relying on it.

Reddit also - in my opinon - actively enables shilling and botposting. Why do they have an API?A forum that&#x27;s meant to be 100% about humans talking to humans doesn&#x27;t need an API, so why does it expose one?Also the model of user-created and user-moderated subreddits actively enables the creation of shill accounts. It&#x27;s trivial to create a subreddit and use it to farm karma with a ton of bots. If you can keep real users from ever entering your walled garden of a subreddit (of which there are many) your bots will never be detected until you wipe their comment history and set them loose on the rest of the site.

&gt; I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren&#x27;t trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads.There is so much shilling on Reddit if you knew it would blow your mind. I wish more people realized this. Reddit is the best place to shill because not only is it ridiculously simple, people also automatically assume you’re not shilling, and then once you seed the idea, everyone else will do the shilling for you indirectly.The healthiest way to use Reddit is like Wikipedia: assume the information you’re reading is highly compromised and biased in one way or another, but use it as a starting point in your further research and it’s a great tool.Reddit posts are not your friends. Upvotes do not mean the contents of the posts are legitimate or not shilling.Reddit is the best place to shill and the sooner the non-shillers figure that out, the better off the entire internet will be.

Yup, when I want to search anything I use a combination of reddit, HN, and Discord. My main use of Google these days is to find a website I forget the name of but roughly know what it&#x27;s called. In the olden days, I used bookmark aggregation sites like del.icio.us to search for relevant content, which was generally more fruitful than a Google search.

I agree. Often, what I am after online is to see what other real people are saying about something. typing &#x27;reddit&#x27; into google is basically a proxy for &quot;please google for the love of good, can you start indexing actual human discussions again?&quot;.

&gt; I hadn&#x27;t heard of this. Now that&#x27;s some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today&#x27;s world it seems totally plausible.Nice try. That&#x27;s totally what a bot would say.

I think it would be foolish to assume google hasn&#x27;t spent hundreds of hours in meetings talking about what they can do about everyone having to type reddit. Problem is they are facing an army of SEO experts who are one step ahead of google. As well as legal issues. Imagine if it was found google was artificially boosting reddit in an unfair way.

Google could fix this by making the algorithm take into account searches that often end with &quot;reddit&quot;, thus applying more weight to Reddit results to similar searches where the user didn&#x27;t include Reddit in it. Clearly it&#x27;s an indicator that those are the better results.Take StackOverflow for example. Almost any programmer will find a SO result as the top result and it&#x27;s usually exactly what you&#x27;re looking for. Since there&#x27;s no money to be made by companies writing blog posts on debugging a compiler error, Google&#x27;s algorithm works as intended.Question is: Why hasn&#x27;t Google done anything about this? 
It&#x27;s the organic results that are terrible, so they&#x27;re not losing ad revenue by placing these garbage sites at the top. Perhaps its to intentionally make better websites pay for ads to get better placement? But those won&#x27;t be the ones to ever pay to begin with...

Dead Internet Theory is totally believable.  I remember back in 2006-7 or so, being slightly curious about putting up a food review site because I was really angry at my local X food establishment.  I found places were you could buy complete restaurant database ready to be scripted onto the web for maybe 90 a pop.  The data was actually pretty good, but I was shocked by the huge community around flipping these dbs into internet spam.  For the very high majority these were hungry business types who could barely open a code editor without asking for help.  I only expect the problem has gotten exponentially worse since then now that ai generated content has improved in quality.

&gt; The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like RedditAre you a fan of r&#x2F;mtb or r&#x2F;mountainbiking?

Google knows what it wants. Its job is to convince you to agree with it.

&gt;&gt; &quot;Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant&quot; ...&quot;&gt; This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.Yeah I remember this being mentioned in a local presentation at university. As a great thing. Google doesn&#x27;t search for what you write, but what you want.The problem is that very often Google don&#x27;t know what I want. Before they introduced this, I was able to define my query so that I got exactly what I wanted.

&gt;Let&#x27;s be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymoreDo you have anything substantive to support this? I highly doubt it is true given the fact that the verb &quot;to google&quot; literally means &quot;to search the internet&quot;.

&gt; It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level.On my IOS device, under Settings -&gt; Safari -&gt; Search Engine, I have a drop down with options, including Bing and DuckDuckgo, but defaulted to google.On Macos, with Safari running, Safari -&gt; Preferences… -&gt; Search, Search Engine I have a drop down, defaulted to google, with Bing and DuckDuckgo amongst other choices.Agreed on google”s effort to get their search engine as the default. However I just don’t understand how changing search engine is impossible given what I’m seeing on my devices? Nor does it seem over the top onerous to my eyes.

&gt; It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level.There are five (very simply accessible) different choices for Safari on iOS.But if you switch to iCabMobile on iOS there are TWENTY-FIVE search engines to choose from.

There&#x27;s a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven&#x27;t! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers.I disagree. Two to three years ago I could get more what I wanted in a complex search once I tuned it properly. So Google had a twenty year run of good and useful searches. Google also worked to strong arm their monopoly, yes. But I claim they still served some quality after that. It&#x27;s not that unusual for a monopoly built on quality to maintain their quality for a period of time after it achieves that monopoly status - institutional standards die but they can die over time.

I would think that there&#x27;d be an online opportunity for a search engine that only searches humanly curated sites. Those sites would be ones that have quality information rather than spam. Some obvious examples - wikipedia, reddit, hackernews, public domain books, etc.It&#x27;s easy to game an algorithm, but hard to game a human - humans know garbage when they see it.As an aside, whenever I get a prescription, included with it is a dense two page sheet of detailed information about the drug. I see nothing like that online with a search. Why is this sort of thing not online?

&gt; almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore...Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching GoogleI don&#x27;t disagree with this as a fact, but I think there are a lot of things that work this way that aren&#x27;t actually monopolies in the competition-preventing sense. If I wanted to launch a new breakfast cereal, getting my product into grocery stores would be one of the major challenges of starting that business. Competition for shelf space is a core concern of a lot of consumables. This definitely creates a lot of stickiness and barriers, and that comes with its share of downsides, but there are also good reasons that distribution systems work the way they do. Transaction costs are important.

Just tried <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andisearch.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;andisearch.com&#x2F;</a> and I like it. Felt like a fresh look on results instead of the same old SEO ones. For example, searched for a few Java queries and found very informative website&#x2F;results that weren&#x27;t dominated by Bealdung. Searched for &quot;soccer scores&quot;, &quot;chelsea FC&quot;, &quot;prince andrew&quot;, &quot;WP export&quot; and found things that would never have been on Google&#x27;s first page, but were excellent returns. Nice work.

I have tried using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, but Firefox changed it back to Google with every update, so eventually I just gave up on that endeavor.

“…almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore”? 6-8 quality leads in the last 14 days (ave. sale at $3,200) on less than $220 spent on ads begs to differ with you. We’ve only started advertising the last two weeks. We’ve had calls and form submissions _all_ from Google and we only launched our site roughly 45 days ago. I’m not a Google fanboy and I think Search does need an overhaul but people are mostly definitely using Google Search. Another client of mine gets 8-12 new customers per month all from Google searches and she doesn’t spend a dime on Google.

Distribution will come if the product is better, but it is a hard problem. I try every new search engine I can and they are always worse&#x2F;slower than google.

Just tried andisearch and am extremely impressed. It has so far handled all queries I have thrown at it better than brave search and DDG. Will continue to experiment, best of luck and awesome work!

&quot;almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore&quot;May I ask how you arrived at this observation? This is the first time I am hearing this. I know of NO ONE who uses any other search engine. The term &quot;Googled&quot; is not yet a proxy for other search sites.

&quot;Let&#x27;s be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore.&quot;This bluntness does not go far enough. People do not change defaults, no matter how &quot;easy&quot; it may be to do so.A default is a pre-made choice by someone other than the consumer. There is no set-up process where the consumer makes a choice. The choice has already been made. Consumers do not make this choice. Even if they could, in practice they don&#x27;t. That fact may seem insignificant but it is worth billions of dollars.If I am not mistaken, the current CEO of Google spent most of his time working on &quot;default search engine&quot; (or &quot;default web browser&quot;) deals before taking the CEO job. In probably the most important one, Google pays Apple a hefty sum to be the default search engine. It was estimated at $10 billion in 2020 and $15 billion in 2021.[1]Defaults are effectively permanent settings. It does not matter how easy it is to change a default setting if practically no one ever does it. $15 billion is too much to pay for something that may or may not change. It does not change. It is money in the bank.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5mac.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;analysts-google-to-pay-apple-15-billion-to-remain-default-safari-search-engine-in-2021&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;9to5mac.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...</a>

Firefox on Linux Mint was pointing at something else for a while (DDG I think? Bing? I don&#x27;t recall).I gave up after a few weeks and had to switch it back to Google. Google&#x27;s not perfect - it&#x27;s never been perfect, it was just better than the alternatives - but it&#x27;s still less bad than others.

I might be wrong, but they also have a moat I&#x27;m the sheer amount of compute required to trawl through the internet?I mean maybe they was true and now they don&#x27;t... But yeah good luck!

Is there a reason why you&#x27;ve chosen the chat style interface vs the standard search box at the top and results at the bottom layout?This is not a comment on the search results itself - always appreciate the efforts to break out of the standard google results and surface other sources, but I found the interface confusing and the previews were also taking up a lot of space. A compact view would be better - or giving the option to turn the previews on &#x2F; off.

There&#x27;s a reason why it seems shocking that Google has been able to balance the ads well enough that people still use it. They haven&#x27;t! Google has orchestrated a monopoly over search engine distribution that allows them to get away with search results that are dominated by ads and spam, without losing most consumers.Let&#x27;s be blunt here - almost no consumer consciously chooses to use Google search anymore. Google has a distribution monopoly through Android, its deal with Apple on iOS and MacOS, and on desktop through Chrome.I&#x27;m working on a search engine startup. It is in all practical senses impossible for an iPhone or Mac user to change their search engine to a new search engine on Safari or at the iOS level. And despite being technically possible on desktop with Chrome, it is for all practical purposes beyond what any typical consumer can easily do.Their monopoly over distribution - not search result quality - is what keeps consumers searching Google and clicking ads.

&gt;I&#x27;m sure that fifteen years from now, DuckDuckGo will be ad-infested crapIn terms of direct ads, perhaps. But for SEO spam, in many cases, DDG already seems to be there. For example, things as simple as &quot;python datetime&quot;, &quot;python json&quot;, or &quot;python datetime.now&quot;, where it would seem obvious that the top result would be the documentation for the module&#x2F;function, have spam sites above the actual Python documentation. Meanwhile, search for &quot;matplotlib&quot;, and your screen will fill up with ads.

This fits well with my own worldview. I&#x27;ve been griping about Google results for years, and jumped for DuckDuckGo when it became usable. I&#x27;m sure that fifteen years from now, DuckDuckGo will be ad-infested crap and someone new will come along to replace it, just as Google replaced AltaVista.Even DDG knows that it can&#x27;t handle everything, and so it has its bang shortcuts. I&#x27;ve used the !reddit one, and I&#x27;d use !w (Wikipedia) except I do those from the Firefox search bar.I&#x27;ve heard the &quot;everything&#x27;s a bot&quot; theory before, but never saw a name put to it before. I&#x27;d have to guess that 99% of all SMTP traffic is spam at this point.

Thanks, I hadn&#x27;t realized I can use site:reddit.com also for recipes!

I wish Google would offer two different search products, one assuming Google-fu, and one not.

&gt; If you want to distribute an .exe or .app, MS and Apple have released some pretty good tools to help.You mean having to pay them for the priviledge of not being flagged as &quot;dangerous&quot; by shitty machine learning algorithms?

Google&#x27;s problem is they&#x27;ve virtually nothing (given their resources) to &quot;commoditizing their complement&quot;. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Complement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;Complement</a>Google&#x27;s compliment is web sites. What have they done to make a web site easier to make?They even killed their RSS feed. They have released a bit of web tech, but their offerings are generally a bit sad or only solve Google problems (e.g. Go).If you want to distribute an .exe or .app, MS and Apple have released some pretty good tools to help. If you want to write a blog or make a simple web app, it&#x27;s unlikely you&#x27;re going to think &quot;Google has some great stuff to help, and has awesome tools&quot;. Mozilla&#x27;s web resources are better. Microsoft&#x27;s web resources are better.

&gt; The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the webThis point especially rings true for me, but it also concerns me a bit. Reddit has killed a lot of other forums over the years. If something happens to Reddit, we run the risk of losing a large corpus of information.

Makes sense why they would fuzzy search. Not all users can be expected to know Google fu.So let mainstream use fuzzy and keep power user features. The big issue is power user support is gone for people with Google fu.Ads or no ads isn’t really an issue for this because it’s such a small percentage of users that know Google fu.

&gt;Dead Internet TheoryReminds me of the &quot;birds aren&#x27;t real&quot; theory. Its almost more social commentary than a serious theory

The death of the authentic web really chimes with me. I have an almost physical reaction when I occasionally come across a page that isn’t trying to sell me something, that is a labour of love.A month or so ago, I was trying to help someone retrieve some very old Wordpress for Mac files. I found <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.columbia.edu&#x2F;~em36&#x2F;wpdos" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.columbia.edu&#x2F;~em36&#x2F;wpdos</a> and was so touched, I sent the author a few dollars for a coffee

Maybe a different kind of terror than Dead Internet Theory: the Internet is &quot;alive&quot;, but it acts as if it was dead.

I have a similar habit, I often search &quot;[topic] forum&quot; - I&#x27;m not fond of Reddit specifically due to accessibility issues although in some cases I still go there because it&#x27;s the only good source.

That&#x27;s so funny, because I use Google to search reddit, because Google&#x27;s search of reddit is better than Reddit&#x27;s.

More info about the Dead Internet Theory (DIT)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.agoraroad.com&#x2F;index.php?threads&#x2F;dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.agoraroad.com&#x2F;index.php?threads&#x2F;dead-internet-...</a>Archive: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;VoaxV" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;VoaxV</a>

Google was boiling the frog really really slow.You can still can get exact searches by google dorks but &quot;normal&quot; people might find &quot;google trying to be smart&quot; actually useful.

That does not make sense. If searches did not result in satisfactory results, then people would stop searching.Which they are, evidenced by restricting searches to HN or Reddit.This is a problem for google, maybe not right this minute as growth might offset dissuaded users, but nevertheless, it does not behoove them in the long run to provide garbage search results to people.

&gt; - &quot;There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory...&quot;
&gt; I hadn&#x27;t heard of this. Now that&#x27;s some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today&#x27;s world it seems totally plausible.I never believed in conspiracy theories, and after I read &quot;Media Control&quot; by Noam Chomsky I understood there is no need for conspiracy theories once you understand how individual incentives are aligned and how individuals always act to maximise profits.Someone on HN phrased this and I am not taking credit for it but it explains beautifully whats going on: &quot;Google is not making money by showing you the best search result they can, they make money by keeping you searching.&quot;

We&#x27;ve also got to address the people and corporations that are gaming the system that google has created. Google is by no means off the hook, but Marketing practices have also taken a very bad turn to deception and in reinforcing a payola systems recently that we may never be able to recover from trust-wise.

Meanwhile you still need Google to search reddit as reddit&#x27;s built in search remains trash.

I agree google is bad, but I think reddit is rapidly becoming equally as inauthentic. I&#x27;m sure every major player at this point understands the gains that can be had by astroturfing reddit. The real problem seems to be the internet is inherently untrustworthy and going back to finding people you trust in the real world is the only fix I can see.

&gt;most of the web has become too inauthentic to trusti think that specialised search engines are gaining ground. For example, I am using github search for searching code samples, that works better than google.You might want to check my side project that tries to explore the subject. I have a search tool &#x2F; catalog of duckduckgo !bang operators, i am hoping that it allows for better discoverability of specialized search engines.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mosermichael.github.io&#x2F;duckduckbang&#x2F;html&#x2F;main.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mosermichael.github.io&#x2F;duckduckbang&#x2F;html&#x2F;main.html</a> - (best viewed on a PC).The latest addition is a description for each search engine, just hover over the name, and you get a description derived from the sites meta and title tags.I think that specialised search engines are gaining ground, it has become easier to set one up, thanks to elasticsearch&#x2F;lucene. They can be quite good, for a limited domain, and they don&#x27;t have to invade your privacy in order to find out what you are looking for. I think that what is missing are tools like this, that would aid the discovery and use of these search engines. I hope that this will allow them to eat into the market from the &#x27;low end&#x27;.The projects source is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mosermichael&#x2F;duckduckbang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mosermichael&#x2F;duckduckbang</a>Unfortunately they don&#x27;t invest too much into !bang operators at duckduckgo, however that&#x27;s my input data...

&quot;It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines...&quot;I don’t think this is the problem. The problem is the need for public companies to grow exponentially. If you take away the need to constantly grow exponentially, then ads on search can be both balanced well and make an insane amount of money.

SEO is ads Google is failing to monetize.That said, the reason the Reddit trick works is that it uses information Google explicitly excludes when ranking content (engagement signals).Google has a bunch of “objective standards” that it uses to paternalistically shape what the web looks like. Many of these are divorced from what users actually want for pieces of content (https, AMP, a life story in front of recipes to demonstrate authorship, etc).

I think the OP is weak because it conflates ads and seo spam. Yes, Google went all in with ads, and yes, this hurt its credibility and the quality of its products.But there is no conceivable universe where seo spam isn&#x27;t the arch enemy of Google. Google needs to fight spam to survive, it knows it and it does. But that&#x27;s hard. So hard in fact, that nobody else has cracked the problem, and for all the anecdotal evidence of someone switching to Bing, Google&#x27;s marketshare is still utterly dominant.The Dead Internet Theory may have some weight: Google hasn&#x27;t dropped the ball, but it is slowly drowning into the sea of &quot;content-free content&quot;.But if that&#x27;s the case, so is everyone else.

I think there’s actually two dimensions to this problem and the article and your comment only address one of them.The other dimension is that, in the past, if you searched for stuff your results were likely to be a blog or a forum thread. Today the bloggers have evolved into instagrammers, TikTokkers, YouTubers, or Podcasters. The Forums and community pages have moved to Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, etc.So it’s not just that SEO and botspam has eaten the Google results page, it’s that this is all that’s left of the open internet that needed search to navigate. Much of it truly is a wasteland. Google owns part of the blame for crippling RSS and privileging recent pages and specific domains or AMP pages over evergreen, self-hosted content in search results. But also users have given up on the open internet in droves. Instead of starting a fansite they start fan subreddits or discords instead.

It&#x27;s perhaps a little bit early in its creation to be sharing this but I am working on a new search that should help to fix the problems mentioned in the article, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namusearch.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;namusearch.com&#x2F;</a>. It allows you to build (and share with others) a curated list of websites that you want to use for searches

&gt;&gt; &quot;Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant&quot; ...&quot;&gt; This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.I hate this too. I do get typos corrected by Google. But I don&#x27;t need that - if I put a typo in my query and get bad results, I can correct the typo myself. But if Google decides I must not have meant what I actually said, there&#x27;s no way for me to correct that. It&#x27;s a ridiculously bad tradeoff - we eliminate errors that are trivially fixed by introducing errors that can&#x27;t be fixed at all.I have similar feelings about phone input autocorrect, which automatically converts typos that are very easy to read into (mostly) correctly spelled words, plus (sometimes) completely unintelligible nonsense.

Search Reddit Via Google: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchbettr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchbettr.com&#x2F;</a>

&gt; I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren&#x27;t trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads.Oh my sweet summer child. Reddit is absolutely infested with paid shills.

&quot;The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web.&quot;I just wanted to mention that a friend of mine made an app for user-reported trail conditions that might be worth taking a look at:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trekko.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trekko.app&#x2F;</a>

&gt; The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.It&#x27;s only a matter of time before reddit too becomes too inauthentic to trust. Not only is it directly funded by advertising, its audience is mainstream enough for advertisers to invest time and money posting fake opinions in order to make it look like it&#x27;s coming from real people.I seriously hope I never see comments or news about people appending hacker news to searches. I don&#x27;t want advertisers to kill this site when they catch wind of it.

&gt;because results on other sites aren&#x27;t trustworthyReddit is gamed way more than google. Paid posters, moderation of anything against a narrative. Google search may be dying, but reddit ain&#x27;t doing much better.

Google doesn&#x27;t care about indexing the internet, that&#x27;s easy. Every other product they have built since search has been about indexing you.

Oh come on you type 15 letters by accident all the time :)

Some really good thoughts here. I&#x27;ll summarize the ones that hit me:- &quot;Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.&quot;This is it for me exactly. I search for the following kinds of things on Reddit exactly because results on other sites aren&#x27;t trustworthy: Reviews are secretly paid ads. The &quot;best&quot; recipe for pancakes is only what&#x27;s trending on instagram right now. The latest conditions on mountain bike and hiking trails are being shared inside communities like Reddit but not on the web. The same for trending programmer tools.- &quot;It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines...&quot;What I&#x27;m shocked by is that Google somehow maintained a balance on this for so long. Well, at least a good enough balance that people still use it primarily.- &quot;Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant&quot; ...&quot;This is the most annoying behavior because I really mean what I write.- &quot;There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory...&quot;I hadn&#x27;t heard of this. Now that&#x27;s some sci-fi level of conspiracy but in today&#x27;s world it seems totally plausible.

Put the word you actually want in quotation marks. (It used to be &quot;prefix it with +&quot; but then Google+ happened and they changed it.)

Try searching &quot;median height&quot; and all you get is &quot;average height&quot;. Goddmit

In the category of features that think they know better than the user, I hate whoever decided they should start using word embeddings in searches.For example, you get the same results for &quot;expand&quot; and &quot;extend&quot; with both words highlighted in results when you search for either. This makes google entirely useless for complex technical topics with decades&#x2F;centuries of established jargon. Searching for mathematics has become a torture.

And three million youtube videos for &quot;funny noises compilation&quot; featuring various farts

Just the way Chrome insists on auto-completing searches has seriously damaged the efficiency of my Googling.  I&#x27;ll search something like &quot;Type-97 whatsit making funny noises&quot;, get no results, go to search just for &quot;type-97 whatsit&quot; and it adds the rest back on by itself and I get the same useless results from the first time.  I don&#x27;t make the mistake often enough to remember not to make it, and every time I wonder what moron decided that was a vital feature that shouldn&#x27;t be able to be turned off.

Ye I have that one to and search hits gets notably better by just adding some 20 sites to it for tech querries.I makes me wonder how Google can mess this up.

I have found that installing uBlacklist (a browser extension) and blocking these sites from search results as I encounter them helps noticeably. There are only so many of these &quot;clone&quot; sites that rank highly on Google, so I found it pretty easy to keep up with them for the things I usually search for. There are even shared uBlacklist lists for things like SO clones, but I haven&#x27;t even bothered to use them.

It’s sad but I also noticed I have to add « wiki » more and more because Wikipedia is increasingly not the first result for searches where it should be the first result. Instead there’s often the stupid Google widget obviously copying Wikipedia’s content without a direct link to the actual page.

appending &quot;wiki&quot; is also really useful if you&#x27;re looking for straight facts

One FTE at Google could probably filter out like 99% of the SEO spam sites in technical english querries.It would be a winning battle, since it is less work to blacklist than to make a high scoring site.I guess Google Search internally is a mess. Maybe they have no clue what they are doing or have some really bad directors and lower managers messing stuff up.Maybe there are so much blackbox ML called from 1000s of Perl files that the engineers don&#x27;t understand what is happening.

&gt;Why wouldn&#x27;t Google filter out the worst offenders?There are no Google adverts on GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc but there are on many of the copycat sites.

I&#x27;m not sure about these days, but historically the engineers on Google search wanted to fix these problems algorithmically, rather than delisting specific sites by hand

Those are infuriating.  I hate to see ACTUAL content creators having their livelihoods stolen this way.  Why wouldn&#x27;t Google filter out the worst offenders?  It takes literally one minute to get a nice list of a dozen imitation sites that nobody would miss.  Maybe Google feels a little inhibited from &#x27;choosing the winners&#x27; for all but the largest cases?

Indeed, that&#x27;s why I built <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;letsblock.it&#x2F;filters&#x2F;search-results" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;letsblock.it&#x2F;filters&#x2F;search-results</a>

We need AdBlock lists for search engines at this point.

If you can do this, so can Google. This just shows they refuse to.

Here is my uBlock filter with hundreds of GitHub&#x2F;StackOverflow copycats: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;quenhus&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-dev-filter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;quenhus&#x2F;uBlock-Origin-dev-filter</a>It blocks copycats and hide them from multiple search engines. You may also use the list with uBlacklist.

There HAS to be a way for google to detect a site is a copy and de-rank it. I refuse to believe their army of PhDs can&#x27;t figure this out. Google&#x27;s incentives are wrong. They make more money from SEO spam with ads than from the original sites.

I&#x27;ve noticed that I have started doing that recently - appending reddit to my queries.There just seems to be a load of imitation sites now, like 6 different wrapper sites for GitHub, 8 for StackOverflow, a couple for GitLab, something aggregating a load of forums - so the first couple of pages are the exact same content - just from 15 different sites that copy the originals.At least going with a community site there tends to be actual discussion and or useful links to the relevant content

A bit of both, I think, they feed into each other.Google being useless for something like product reviews means that any smaller sites that are any good are not getting the traffic they deserve, because they&#x27;re being outcompeted by the ads and the fake review sites.People still need the content, though. But how do you find that review without a search engine? You have to resort to that even though Google sucks for the general web, it&#x27;s still very much useful if you restrict it to something very particular. You have to know where to start though, so you have to resort to one of the 4-5 huge sites like Reddit or Hacker News where you know people are going to be discussing whether a given wifi router is any good or not.Which has the side effect of concentrating things even more on those sites. If the place you can trust for networking equipment reviews is Reddit, then probably you&#x27;ll also comment somewhere on Reddit next time you get bitten by a bad one and want a second opinion or just to warn people. And reddit gets bigger still.

I don&#x27;t know about dying, but definitely more hidden from view. Google owns a huge share of the search market and a lot of the remainder information discovery is on the large social portals.Alt search engines do offer an alternative view to what&#x27;s out there, but are not on the scale of Google and many of them are ultimately meta search engines relying on Bing for crawling and indexing.

The thesis seems a lot closer to &quot;the open Web is dying&quot;.

Google Search Is Dying