How users discover information on the internet is changing
Reddit’s search engine is notoriously awful, if I wanted to find something on Reddit I would Google it with site:reddit.com in the query, that gets great results.
As for Tik Tok, isn’t that a short video site? Its very popular and clearly good at what it does, but how can I search it for a Wikipedia article, or a rotten tomatoes review of a film I’m interested in, or bus timetables, or opening times for a local store, or helpful coding solutions, or wiring diagrams for circuits, or converting values or translating text, or any of the many, many more things I use Google for every day.
On a personal note, while I’ve sold my soul to one or two major western corporations, I’m never going to willingly provide the Chinese government with any more information about me than it may already have. Certainly not about to start directly informing them of my searching or video watching habits.
Nor will I ever support their genocides and many other human rights violations and evil cruelties if I can avoid it. Tik Tok isn’t just some hip new app that’s cool to use, it’s an evil fascist government’s tool for surveillance and control.
Crazy thing is, I’m not even a conspiracy nut, I’m just citing a well known fact, and yet people keep using it anyway because they just don’t care :-(
Yeah I’ve notice how Google search has increasingly become an ad delivery engine.
Amazon now pushes tons of cheap Chinese trash the likes of wish.com, Google pushes fucking irrelevant ads, and Reddit just went down the toilet. I’m really seeing everything great become shitty first hand :(
SEO killed the search. Everything now is just autogenerated blogs with popup windows and affiliated links to amazon.
“Reddit vs Google for search”
Here’s 47 sites like topcomparisons.com and bigdifferences.net
Thanks Google. Prime shit
Why not useDDG instead of all the weird options mentioned in the article?
Bing is fine. DDG uses it. Adding reddit to your search is an old trick. Only searching with TikTok was new and weird for me. I have no Idea how this works.
Considering the TikTok user demographics, you’d do better without its search results.
If you want to push the “reddit search trick” further, CrowdView expands it to include other forums that have a higher signal to noise ratio than the rest of the internet.
Yeah, I either use Ecosia or DuckDuckGo these days. Ecosia is ok if you carefully craft your query.
@zecg SO TOO WITH ALTAVISTA
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I do not understand why Google has become so ossified. They must know they’re strangling their own business, surely? Do they somehow think they’re irreplaceable? That no one will ever build a better search engine? And the best they can come up with is AI-generated search nonsense? As if that’s going to help.
Stop trying to make maximum profits for minimum effort, fire whatever useless exec is in charge over there, and get someone who actually wants to fix things before someone eats your lunch, Google!
All searches are just now 99% filler and its extremely difficult to find the actual information you’re looking for.
I remember when Google search was almost a flat search and the needed result was usually at 10th page or something.
It still was there, though. Not the case now sometimes.
But reddit’s search sucks!
I type my question in Google with reddit at the end. Then my lovely Firefox extension redirects me to the web archive version.
I worked for Google for about 10 years, and when I started they definitely knew Bing was a strong enough competitor to eat their lunch if they slacked off in the constant arms race against malicious SEO. I wonder what happened.
If you can’t defeat them, join them is what happened
Not surprising really. Google has decided that it really doesn’t want me to use it so I switched to DDG a couple of years ago. And it doesn’t feel like I’ve lost anything of value.
It’s sad that search is in the state its in these days. It’s harder to find useful or in-depth information. The first results are always someone who has used SEO to get to the top of the results to sell their product or just other garbage. If you really wanted to find people’s opinions on things, adding site:reddit.com/r/whatever_topic to your search really was the best way.
I’ve been finding ChatGPT increasingly useful lately, both because ChatGPT is useful and because Google search feels like it’s been in decline.
I’m not a coder. At all. I probably have slightly better understanding than the average non-coder, but looking at code tends to make my eyes glaze over. I’m typically good with the logic of what I want to happen, but the syntax and simply knowing what functions are available are things I really struggle with.
A few days ago, I decided I wanted to make a somewhat simple script. I spent several hours trying things, googling for solutions to the problems I encountered, and ultimately I got nowhere. Yesterday, I decided I should give ChatGPT a go. Not only did I get ChatGPT to write the entire script for me, with me just giving it prompts on what I wanted it to do, but it managed to explain pretty much everything it was doing - with answers tailored to my exact code. When things didn’t work, it could speculate on why it might not have worked, and try alternative solutions.
It was a fairly collaborative process. There were points where I could see things that ChatGPT hadn’t caught, like certain lines of code that had become unnecessary after iterating, or that variables hadn’t been defined properly, and I could point then out and it’d fix them.
Using ChatGPT isn’t entirely the same as googling for information, but I think you have to take a fairly similar approach with how you use both. Your language has to be precise and clear, you need to have an understanding of what output you want, and how to tailor your input to achieve that output. And you need to understand how to use the output it gives you - sometimes it’ll be wrong, or only partial. Sometimes it’ll require further steps to get the final result you’re looking for.
Yeah ive heard that ChatGPT and the like are actually pretty good options for some things. Maybe i’ll try them out some more. Thanks for the insight.
I use google. I type “<insert thing I am looking up> reddit”
lemmy replacing reddit in this one is exactly what i want. it will take time but it would be great if does the job one day.
For starters I think Lemmy search engine is better than Reddit’s.
idk about search engine but what i meant in my last comment is about is the content that’s available on the reddit. to be a replacement of all those content that was on reddit having answer for variety of things is not something lemmy can do easily.
Reddit is to be expected but TikTok, really?! I can’t see it a suitable as a search engine+ What an awful experience I had with that platform, it kept showing me garbage content in the 2 times I tried it and yes I tried the “don’t show me this type of content anymore” option and it didn’t change anything
Lol was this written a year ago? All the homies use AI powered search now. Bing chat is surprisingly good for me
Whiney Bing is useless for me.
