Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
Google executives acknowledged this month they need to do a better job surfacing user-generated content after the recent Reddit blackouts.
I habitually enable “verbatim” mode. I find most problems with google search now are keywords in my search being removed because google thinks it knows what I’m searching better than a literal string describing specifically that. The problem isn’t that reddit is less accessible, it’s that google is trying to do some unwanted manipulation of your results to “optimize your search” but it end up making worser results. They need to stop with the “I know what you want better than you” mentality when showing results because that’s how the results get so bad. You can see that in youtube too with how they show you clickbait with every search. I also think AI is or will be making that mentality worse… AI is just statistics at its core, and I feel like that will have biases toward more commonly asked stuff and away from more specific and technical answers.
The evolution of Google search has been wild to live through. I remember being able to tell people to google search certain terms to show them esoteric (or funny) things on the internet, because everyone got the same results. Then they started personalizing results and it got creepy good at it. I use Linux a lot, so I look up things about Linux a lot. I needed to SSH into a Linux box from a Windows 8.1 laptop. No native SSH client, because Windows can’t actually do anything. Okay, I needed to download PuTTY. So I googled ‘putty’. And Google did not hedge its bet, every single result I got was about the TTY client. No plumbers putty, no silly putty, nothing.
Now it seems Google can’t find its ass with both hands and a flashlight.