this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Blocking other search engines will hurt Reddit, all else held equal. But not by that much. Google is seriously dominant in the search engine market.
kagis
Yeah.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
According to this, Google has 91.06% of the search engine market. So for Reddit, they're talking about cutting themselves off from a little under 9% of people searching out there. Which...I mean, it isn't insignificant, but it isn't likely gonna hurt them all that badly.
It's also worth noting that the 9% they cut off was probably the group more inclined to already be using alternatives to Reddit anyways.
You underestimate the amount of average joes that use stuff like DuckDuckGo
Seconding this. I work in IT, and the number of tech-illiterate people using DuckDuckGo as their default search engine is astounding. It’s got to be about 10% of our users (none of whom are in tech roles).
I would actually think that the 9% they cut off would be more likely than the 91% to be using Reddit.
Yeah I thought the same so it’s good to see the numbers. I don’t think people realize that to support a search engine means letting them crawl your pages which means serving all your pages to them, which costs server resources. A lot of sites get more crawler load than load from actual users viewing pages. It’s a real cost.
Still, you’d think they could manage to support DuckDuckGo at least. Or a small set of search giants to give some appearance of supporting competition.