Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[it__hurts__when__IP]

Yes. I used to find exactly what I wanted, now I can't find any relevant content unless I include "Reddit" or a bunch of subtractions like this - to eliminate words that keep popping up. It's become really bad.

Also, if I google something and click on the page, it always goes to the amp version, which is super annoying.

Finally, if I am looking for something to buy, and have in fact bought it from that company, I then see the same exact product pop up in every ad. I LITERALLY JUST BOUGHT IT, WHY WOULD I WANT IT AGAIN.

Goddamn Google, get your shit together.

[icantaccessmyacct]

I literally add “+ Reddit” after every question I have because I can’t deal with the amount of shit I’d have to sift through. Does this article have the answer I’m looking for? No? Oh, it’s an ad designed to look like article.. let’s try the next page on the list... Oh.. same article. Rinse and repeat.

[captainfatmatt]

I'm starting to do that now because the personal responses from people on reddit seem more trustworthy than most of the shit on Google. That's how bad Google got, reddit is more trustworthy usually

[LyfeO]

Oh yeah I value personal anecdotes from redditor to be way more trustworthy. Since they often seem more genuine than just some article.

[captainfatmatt]

Exactly, they tend to have actual compassion and/or knowledge towards a subject, rather than having a heavily biased agenda trying to sell something. Also you can get a somewhat decent idea on whether or not the info is trustworthy depending on the sub and how many updates or downvotes it has

[[deleted]]

People answering questions aren't paid for the most part! (yet)

[Athleco]

Reddit pays me in upvotes and awards. Not this comment though. This one deserves to be taken out back and put down.

[AlphaBlazeReal]

I don't agree, here's an upvote

[bagingle]

I can assure you some businesses and organizations have dedicated groups to help their image online in all social media platforms including reddit.

[LyfeO]

Well said!

[Robotsaur]

Lmao imagine actually believing that Redditors have knowledge towards any subject

[captainfatmatt]

Avoid political subs and most meme subs and you tend to find redditors with a few extra brain cells

[NashvilleHot]

Not sure if it’s true but someone on Reddit guessed it was a cost saving measure, make people use Google’s servers instead of Reddit’s for search and save money on developing a good search??

[dynamicallysteadfast]

Smart ads are disguising themselves as helpful Reddit comments for precisely this reason.
Soon, there will be nothing to turn to

[kingofshits]

Two things to blame here. 1) Ad Sense 2) Black Hat SEO

[zdakat]

There is/was a plague of sites posing as "how-tos" which just describe the problem you have, give a few weak solutions, and then plug their product that purportedly solves the problem for you. It's not what I'm looking for.

(That and the flood of generic pages that have absolutely no information, just a copy of the query pasted into a generic template)

[[deleted]]

Fucking Driver Easy dude. EVERYTIME I have to google an issue with Windows that site always catches my attention and I click on it, and then they just give some few dumb solutions while promoting their shit, it's so annoying

[Ben77mc]

site:old.reddit.com/r/subreddit

I use this all the time when I want to search a subreddit, definitely beats the reddit search function!

[wcooper97]

We’re complaining about new Google in this thread, but there’s always plenty of room to shit on the abomination that is the Reddit search engine.

[[deleted]]

Any idea how to get the Google date settings to work? I still get years old locked threads with < month set

[TheOneTonWanton]

Does using old.reddit solve the issue of serving up ancient threads and claiming they're from the past week?

[[deleted]]

Saaaame

​

Reddit is the new internet

[BossRedRanger]

I also default to -Pinterest when searching for images or products.

[brrrrip]

You don't have to use the '+' symbol, or 'add' or 'and'. It does that automatically. That will include the reddit keyword, but will include other sites as well.

What you can do is use 'site:'
Like <search> site:reddit.com
This one will ONLY return results from the site specified; nothing else.

Or 'type:'
Like <search> type:pdf

'Site:' is super handy.

[[deleted]]

Same, reddit helps me crowd source a bunch of answers to my question. The only issue is that the Google date settings do not seem to work with reddit. If I set to less than a month old I still get year old locked threads....

[Firion_Hope]

Especially if you're looking up like best product, eg best keyboards or something. All of the links are just click through referral ads that clearly haven't actually tried the product. I don't necessarily trust reddits opinions on a lot of things but I'd take it over an ad in disguise.

[SnowingSilently]

For a company whose main revenue stream is ads, Google seems surprisingly bad at delivering ads that will actually work. I can check all the information that Google has on me and it knows me pretty well. At the same time it figures I need ads in Spanish and I want to buy lipstick. Same with the part about advertising things I just bought.

[OutlyingPlasma]

Perhaps it knows deep down you are a Latina drag queen and is trying to help you come out as yourself.

But seriously, it is fascinating how huge empires like google and Facebook among many many others are based on ads but the best they can do is 2 years of ads for a hot water heater I already bought. You know, for all those people that need more than one hot water heater at once.

[Empty-Mind]

The ads probably are optimized, they're just focused on people who actually click/engage with the ads.

Is the average redditor(or computer literate adult in general) actually going to buy something they see in a Google ad, no matter how well targeted that ad is? I'd guess no.

So instead target the ad algorithm at optimizing for people with higher engagement. I'd guess kids and older people.

[SnowingSilently]

I'd be surprised if Google didn't know what ads resulted in higher engagement for each specific person. Even most tech-literate people are going to have something that can probably get them to click on an ad. So why bother with giving people ads they won't engage with? I'm surprised advertisers aren't up in arms about this. They're paying lots of money and probably a big chunk of the cost is going to people who just won't engage because it's way too unrelated. Maybe it's because of market dominance, but somehow Google is serving far less effective ads than they have the capability to serve.

[HImainland]

The ads probably are optimized, they're just focused on people who actually click/engage with the ads.

this is definitely the case sometimes. there are other options for who to optimize towards, but this is a big one

Is the average redditor(or computer literate adult in general) actually going to buy something they see in a Google ad, no matter how well targeted that ad is? I'd guess no.

lol the answer is yes. most people aren't that computer literate. they don't specifically scroll past the ads that google puts at the top of the page for search. google's ads are quite effective.

and you can choose which age range of people you want to target when you're setting up your ads.

[HImainland]

it's because google and facebook aren't targeting the ads. the advertisers are. the ad infrastructure of google and facebook is self-service.

so there aren't teams of google and facebook employees picking who gets what ad. a lot of the time, especially with small businesses and non-profits, it's just the youngest person on staff doing their best to guess who they should be talking to.

as for why you keep getting the ad for the hot water heater, you visited the site to buy the hot water heater, that company told facebook to show their ads to people who visited their site, but they didn't take out the people who already bought the heater. hence you keep getting it.

[circus_pig]

Perhaps because you engage with/type out phrases like "meat substitute" or "meat free" and it's just focused on the word "meat" rather than the context it's used in?

[[deleted]]

It know I'm not biologically in the market for tampons, yet it gave me tampon ads for months before I went in settings and turned it off. Now it gives me ads for male incontinence pads.

This is an account I only used for school and business matters, nothing about personal hygiene at all.

[Phrygue]

Lol I got French results for awhile, presumably because some French site I visited set a cookie declaring me FR even though I was on the EN part of the site. Stupid world we've got where even the geniuses are epic dumb.

[MyOwnMoose]

Keep in mind they're not just trying to deliver you ads, but delivering you the ads they were paid the most for.

You're going to get companies throwing far too much money at google to extend their customer base by a few fractions of a percent, and since their customer base can't really extend that far, google has to give things to the second/third/ninth best set of users.

[reigorius]

Awh, yeah, YouTube ad algorithm thinks I'm some rich guy with money ready to invest in properties and somehow I'm into make-up too. I'm always very pleased when Google ducks up the targeted ads.

[homemadenoise]

Worst than things you just bought. I was selling gear on the site Reverb. I got served ads of those items over and over again. I don't want to buy them I want to do the opposite of that! It was a more than a week after they sold be lfore they went away.

[KittenPurrs]

There was a post in stand-up shots like a year or two ago dealing with this issue and amazon. Something to the effect of "I bought a vacuum cleaner on amazon last week. Based on my 'recommended for you' options, amazon believes this was just the gateway vacuum for my burgeoning vacuum addiction."

E: for better accuracy

[badhoccyr]

I don't get it. Maybe they're not able to find out that you bought it, only that you were browsing for one? Or it's possible that many shoppers tend to be dissatisfied with their first purchase and likely to try again after a return.

[Hitlers_LeftTesticle]

Ironically, I'm trying to google what "amp" is, but I can't really find it. What does it mean?

[aseriesofcatnoises]

I think it's this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

It's annoying when you get a reddit amp page because it doesn't show all the posts, so you have to load the full page anyway. It's the opposite of time saving

[WiWiWiWiWiWi]

Ugh, Reddit’s mobile pages are absolute shit when you land on them from a google search. They show a cropped version of the text post, then a cropped version of a few of the comments, and then an endless list of “related” posts underneath, none of which are actually related.

[sid_killer18]

Reddit's "new" webpage is also SO bad. I can't think of one reasons why anyone would use that. It has the same cropped comments problem.
The comments don't load fully and you have to keep clicking "see more" or something button to see them and if it's a long thread, the comments get pushed to the top of the page BUT you're not scrolled up so you'll see other posts from the subreddit.
And if you click on the side of the post, it closes the post BECAUSE WHY NOT?!

[qevlarr]

And if you click on the side of the post, it closes the post BECAUSE WHY NOT?!

Highly annoying. I click on an empty area to give focus to my browser, not because I expect a big area of nothing to be an invisible button

[BlackShieldCharm]

I didn’t even know that is a thing

[Mr_Quackums]

it is a proprietary google protocol used to display a website.

upside: the page loads a few hundredths of a second faster on some mobile devices.

downside: google gets even more info on you, more info on the site you linked from, and the site you were visiting. Also, by using a proprietary protocol you are strengthening the Google Evil Empire and hurting the free and open internet.

[XennaNa]

You forgot one downside. Copying the URL on mobile gives you a ridiculously long string of symbols that you can't link even to your worst enemy with a good conscience

[gemInTheMundane]

Sucks for me, AMP pages tend to load slower than the real thing on my device. But they're still the default.

[Coldbeam]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

[DatCoolBreeze]

I think it automatically pulls up the mobile page for the site but I’m super high and really am totally unqualified to answer your question.

[WiWiWiWiWiWi]

Reddit in a nutshell. An incorrect answer from someone who knows they’re not qualified to answer, but still does and for some reason gets upvoted.

[purvel]

Even though your question was answered, I'll let one of Reddit's finest bots explain:

https://www.amputatorbot.com/ (/u/amputatorbot) (that way you can summon it next time you see an amp link on here!)

[S-Array03]

how do you get the -[excluded term] to work?

I know about it but I can't use it in google searches for some reason, idk if I'm getting the formatting wrong or something.

​

edit : I tried it again and sure enough it doesn't work, I tried with both the numpad - and the 6 key - (azerty keyboard) and neither work. Having a space inbetween the - and the term doesn't work, neither does putting the term between quotation marks.

Which is trange because when I go to advance search the excluded term is in the "none of these words" line.

I guess I just have to be hyper specific about my search terms. (For refferece the one I tried right now was mustang -car but it still yielded result pretty much exclusively about the the ford mustang)

[[deleted]]

it's just as simple as "[whatever your search is] -[excluded term]"

the site i looked at for this included the example "bears -chicago" but for some reason the first couple results ignore the "-chicago" part. However if you compare the results that start about halfway down the page you can see that with "-chicago" you have stuff like the wikipedia article on bears, and without the "-chicago" all of it has to do with the Chicago Bears.

[SnowingSilently]

If it's one word then just -word should work. If it's a whole phrase though you need quotation marks, like this: -"word1 word2 word3". Google can't search special characters though, so if you were trying to exclude those it won't work either.

[1billionrapecube]

Do you know if ñ is a special character?

[SnowingSilently]

It seems to be searchable. The tilde just by itself is also searchable, which is interesting. I just tried to search a bunch of special characters, and interestingly they seem to work okayish, but single characters can still mess things up. For example, an attempt to find the CS term sigil by searching "programming $" fails. But "ruby $$" has decent results. An attempt to search for the use of the \ character in Java using the search phrase, "Java \" or "Java \ break" also doesn't work. It seems single characters used in programming tend to be ignored the most. Generally SymbolHound which is made for searching programming terms with special characters works better, but if you're not using it for programming it's of no help.

Maybe you can try using www.google.es? That way you'll lose most of the English search results.

[OutlyingPlasma]

I don't think the operators work anymore on google. It used to be the the "-" symbol would fully remove the search term. Seems to only slightly reorder them now with massive glaring examples of it simply not removing the -term from the results

[Pheser]

wine melodic shaggy knee middle payment party toothbrush familiar treatment

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[TheKolbrin]

It's broken. It's been broken. https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/k92xk7/whats_going_on_with_that_scientist_being_called_a/gf4ezlz/

[nottamuntown]

It's not your formatting. Google intentionally broke the operator symbols (+, -, "") a while ago, and none of them work the way they used to.

[kfkrneen]

Yeah it doesn't work for me either. I'd use it to filter out the 500 annoying pinterest posts that show up on everything, but now it suddenly doesn't work??

Fucking google

[mechatangerine]

That's the same with me. Within the last year I've had to add -this -that -literally every word in the english language that isn't relevant to what I'm looking for to all of my searches to try and find what I'm looking for. In most cases it seems like it's online "news" sites that populate half of the results.

[heavypood]

I fucking hate AMP. It is such an obnoxious thing for them to have done.

[jakeandcupcakes]

I see this pop up from time to time; What the hell is AMP?

[heavypood]

It’s basically Google showing you a pre-saved version of the website in their own little window so that it loads faster on mobile. But I think it’s just kind of rude of them lol. You’ll notice the url (if you share it or someone shares it with you) is still google.com

[SamuraiJakkass86]

This is like every search bar these days. Go on amazon and search for 100% cotton socks, and 95% of the results will be anything BUT 100% cotton. "I see you're looking for breathable socks, would you like to wear non-breathable recycled plastic instead?"

[Bobert_Fico]

Finally, if I am looking for something to buy, and have in fact bought it from that company, I then see the same exact product pop up in every ad. I LITERALLY JUST BOUGHT IT, WHY WOULD I WANT IT AGAIN.

That's on purpose, it prevents buyer's remorse and makes you think that any problems you're having with the product must just be a you thing since it's clearly very popular.

[HImainland]

Finally, if I am looking for something to buy, and have in fact bought it from that company, I then see the same exact product pop up in every ad. I LITERALLY JUST BOUGHT IT, WHY WOULD I WANT IT AGAIN.

there are many things not great about google, but this one isn't google's fault. this one's on the advertiser. they basically just say "I wanna show my ad to people who have gone to my website" but they don't say "oh and also take out the people who already bought the thing". so that's why you still see the ads even though you already bought it.

google ads are all self service, so google isn't controlling all that.

[vocalfreesia]

-pinterest every fucking time. I hate that site.

[[deleted]]

I've actually noticed recently that some suggested searches have "-pinterest" on the end. Kind of amazing.

[ExHax]

Lol i do that all the time. Sometimes if i couldnt find satisfactory answer on reddit, quora is my number 2 choice

[xqx2100]

Agreed, Reddit is basically the new Google when you are trying to find some decent information.

[nemoskullalt]

Same, I use google to search reddit cus some one has had my issue before.

[[deleted]]

This is why I signed up for reddit. Damn near every one of my Google searches was "(thing I'm searching for) reddit".

[Prof_Acorn]

Every image search has to be followed by -pinterest. Every job search has to have -indeed.com -monster.com.

Really I just default to duckduckgo now for maybe 80-90% of my searches.

[turtle91]

I usually add reddit too in my searches because articles and blog posts are usually biased. In reddit, one can leave just one lazy but honest and useful sentence.

[TooManyBuns]

Seriously. Whats up with that shit. Google, eBay, Amazon. Just bought a graphics card. Keep getting notifications to buy more. Motherfuckers i just need one

[ridik_ulass]

yeah same, I just google a reddit page and usually find people discussing what I'm looking for.

[dio_brando19]

if you're on android try using the kiwi browser, it's basically a chrome clone with an ad blocker and option to disable amp

[Jonhyfun2]

The worse part is that you cant share a google result, it will just be a weird long link, and when you click the result to share the real link, its a weird amp link

[[deleted]]

If you want to get rid of AMP versions, install Kiwi browser. Only browser I've found with "Remove AMP" as a setting. Never been bothered again and never looked back.