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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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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
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.
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.
...was the search actually misspelled that badly?
Missing one letter is a severe misspelling?
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.
The MD algorithm does make text hard to parse.
Oh wow ... You think one letter is the only problem with that?
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
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.
SEO should have been immediately dealt with years ago by having search engines permanently blacklist domains that pull that shit, no questions asked.