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If google results didn't become total garbage, people wouldn't need to append reddit to searches, I hope google knows that as well.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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I don't really think it's Googles fault that the internet is mostly garbage.
They're convenient scapegoat, but they're essentially a phone book.
It's a bit of a chicken-egg problem. But I'm leaning towards Google in this case.
Google is an advertising company. They get paid to show certain results higher, while balancing relevant results by the number of visits and matching key phrases. This is essentially what SEO is.
There are reports of people having to create a separate website designed for SEO, filled with buzzwords and useless fluff, just to show up on searches. It's a combination of bots, LLM, SEO, and '00s/'10s tech companies actually needing to make money that leads to screwing over the user and their experience to squeeze more profits.
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Except it is, they used to have a good quality crawler that didn't prioritize machine-generated SEO slop from content farms. Within the first page and without adding terms like site:reddit.com, -site:pinterest.com -site:quora.com or before:2016 you could easily get what you wanted.
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The situation with high quality search results becoming inaccessible reminds me of what happened with expertsexchange back in the day. EE adopted a pay wall and in doing so sequestered a bunch of useful technical answers. Their greed turned against them and opened the way for StackOverflow to really take off and gain dominance.
expert sex change
I want one of those. 😔🏳️⚧️
I'll take "the rapists" for $200.
penisland.net therapistfinder.ca
and the fourth one from that segment of QI which I can't recall atm ; edit: it was whorepresents.com
Hilariously, for a short while, their original website address was "expertsexchange.com" until they realized what that looks like and added a hyphen.
I remember that, lol for a LONG time you could just use Google cache and bypass the paywall lmfao.
Don't know when it changed but it doesn't work anymore :(
Whenever I have a tech problem, I add reddit to google search. That's the only way to get good answers from google. This worked great until their API scam.
After switching to the fediverse, I should also replace Google. But with what?
I switched to Duckduckgo recently. So far it works good and gives me helpful results. Can’t give long time Test results, using it since a week. But I think it gets the job done.
I was very happy am that Apple added it as a default option in iOS. I had been using it off and on for years but now it’s been my default in various browsers for I guess about 3-4 years. Generally I find what I want with no problem, but still need to append !g and get the results from Google for some searches. Maybe about 10%, and more often on image searches.
That is really good to hear! I also added it as default search engine in safari and brave since I switched. Thought I have to go full in in order to give it a chance. Where exactly do you add the „!g“?
The "!g" is part of something called "bangs" on DuckDuckGo. Bangs are prefixes to redirect your query to another search engine. For example "!g How to pet a cat" will redirect you to Google, searching for "How to pet a cat"
Other useful bangs are "!m" for maps, "!gi" for Google images, "!so" for stack overflow.
You can find more about it at the bangs page: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
Anywhere in the search string works, and then it redirects you to google.
Oh, and the feature is called “bangs”. I knew there were a good handful of them but apparently there are a ton! Over 13,000?
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After switching to the fediverse, I should also replace Google.
Not necessarily. One step to a better internet at a time. Sometimes people get overwhelmed by free software solutions because they try to do everything at once.
But with what?
I've tried a lot but replacing google search is not easy. You can of course use a meta search engine like searx which is great but then you hand your search traffic directly to some random instance owner. You could also use startpage which is basically a firewall for google search. duckduckgo does work and I use it sometimes but the search results are definitely worse than google's. The bangs are a nice feature though.
I think DuckDuckGo has gotten way better, and Google has gotten way worse. I tend to use DG for most search needs and then append !g to go to Google if the search doesn’t meet my needs.
I was using ddg for a while but got fed up with the kinda shit results.. swapped over to brave search and it seems much better, but not 100% sure if it's got the privacy behind it like ddg does.. have you got any experience with brave search?
I'm thinking of giving Ecosia another go, since I really appreciate their whole "use the whole net income to plant trees" thing. Just gotta check out how well their algorithm does at this point.
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I had over the years posted thousands of answers to question to Python, C#, AngularJS, Angular and React questions. I wiped all of them with shreddit the last couple of days. To give you an idea I have been running it for 2 days over seperate accounts and its still not done.
Reddit respawns deleted posts. Go and sue them!
I've been slowly amending my most like comments (leaving the most downvoted). Yet to see any come back, maybe Reddit didn't value my top notch sarcasm Vs helping people with actually problems.
Reddit hasn't restored any of my comments, either. Not sure if I should feel insulted or not.
So adding the word Reddit to a search query counts as a hack?
Guess I‘m somewhat of a hacker myself.
Depends on your definition of what a hacker is, Hollywood version or techie version
The best hacker is of course the one who can guess the password the fastest (all-lowercase, dictionary word).
That's easy, its ********
Oh I had no idea it would star out your password. Let me try mine too!
hunter1
I ran across Thurgo yesterday just browsing casually. Apprently he's on the lemmy bus too!
Two hackers, one keyboard.
holy shit, that was the worst thing I've ever seen on TV. I feel like the writers have a competition to make the WORST tech faux pas in TV History
We're all on a watchlist now. I'm now sat here in complete paranoia, nibbling at my finger nails just waiting for the doorbell to ring. I already know my face is up on the whiteboard, strings attaching me to reddit, pornhub and the pirate ship.
They're coming, I know it.
I haven't looked into it yet, but I'm hoping there's a way to add default search parameters when searching via Google/Bing/whatever. I just want to add "-site:Reddit.com" and just never see reddit search results again. It'll suck for niche topics, but I don't want to be giving them any of my traffic.
so much for finding an answer to a question only 5 people have ever thought to ask
Ah yes the “search term” + “reddit” trick, works every time. At least it used to…
Cached results still work, right? Like if you see it on Google, Reddit has it garbled, you can see if it's archived, right?
Yeah but most people don't know that
Is there already an alternative to search lemmy/fediverse via google like we all used to do with reddit? e.g. site:
Do we even need this? Or could a search engine be a part of the fediverse, that we use instead of google?
That's definitely doable, probably more doable than the regular web
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