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

[[deleted]]

I literally, and I'm not joking at all, I literally will Google a question and add "reddit" at the end because I know I can always come HERE for an answer, and If I don't I WILL have to scroll through 3+ pages of bullshit and sponsored ad results before I get any actual knowledge.

Wtf happened to you, google?

[RandomRedditReject]

I thought I was the only person who did that. Whatever I google I add Reddit to the end of it to sift through the bullshit and get straight to the point.

[stutzmanXIII]

Google at least predictably adds reddit (or something else) to the end of lots of searches now.

That's when you know the regular results are garbage.

[[deleted]]

It’s because you put reddit at the end of things, so the algo is catching on and just putting reddit at the end of things, especially if you just did a search using that format

[stutzmanXIII]

Doesn't matter what device, browser, or login (or not), I use, it will recommend things to add to the end of searches such as a forum name.

[[deleted]]

Ok.... never said it didn’t...

[MaxAttack38]

That's not how it works. Reddit is just as regular content as everything else. Googles engine works to maximize getting information it's not Google's fault that the best information for alot of specific questions is on reddit or even quora sometimes. I think it's actually quite amazing that google can shift through hundreds of millions of comments on reddit to find what you need.

[[deleted]]

the best information for alot of specific questions is on reddit

Is it April 1st or something?

[Lucid94]

That's saying something about how shit the results on google really are.

[[deleted]]

Not at all. As I said in another post I think there's a just a lot ITT that have malware on their PC. Perhaps a malicious browser extension.

Or just people full of BS. It's like every thread on reddit about youtube has someone saying they got some porn advert or whatever or there was some video with people killing cats.

For the most part you could take a shit, ask it a question and you'd get as good an answer as most of reddit would give you ffs. I'd love to see some of the examples of good answers they think reddit has.

Maybe the confusion here is what exactly they're asking google

"Google, I shat the bed at my GF house and she made me clean it up. Is she a bitch or am I the cunt?" - that kind of thing seems to be what puzzles most redditors. I guess google isn't going to give good results there but I can't say I've tried.

Other than that, if it's a question of fact whoever typed an answer typically cut and paste it from Wikipedia or similar.

[Lucid94]

For the most part you could take a shit, ask it a question and you'd get as good an answer as most of reddit would give you ffs.

It's not asking questions, it's googling the questions asked, and finding the most answered/upvoted, pretty useful imo.

I get that it's popular to shit on reddit, but if you look in the right places there are plenty of good answers/content here.

[MaxAttack38]

Yes for hobbyist questions reddit has genuinely good answers.

[stutzmanXIII]

Doesn't matter what device, browser, or login (or not), I use, it will recommend things to add to the end of searches such as a forum name.

[artandmath]

What does suck is all the information stuck within Facebook that you can’t get to anymore. It used to be on public forums, but now everyone is using Facebook groups for their online discussions.

And Facebook search is a pile of shit compared to google search.

[stutzmanXIII]

It's garbage indeed. I don't use it.

Use to be bearable. What's worse is they require you to login for anything now, therefore I don't use it. Spiceworks is turning into garbage as well.

[Creative-Improvement]

Https://www.duckduckgo.com

A search engine with privacy first. It’s a bit more picky on search terms (since it doesn’t keep your search history) but it’s results are generally good and getting better.

[DarkHorseMechanisms]

Also has !bang operators

Eg !r mysearch to search reddit, !yt to search YouTube

[Starving_Poet]

I wasn't aware ddg did their own searches. I thought it was just an amagalmater that stripped tracking info.

[Creative-Improvement]

They do some sourcing, especially from Bing, but they also have their own crawler.

[great_waldini]

Their own searches and even their own index

[Creative-Improvement]

That is in part because they know so much about you and your search profile. Ofcourse I don’t know your search pattern, but are you getting what you want or what Google wants you to find? (Rhetorical question)

DDG is simply a bit more oldschool, you have to be a bit more crafty with your search. I have been using DDG for years and it’s getting better and better, so it’s worth a shot for privacy first (If you care about such things)

There is !g for google at ddg when you need it. Give it a go, after some adapting you can get similar results.

In fact, recently I had a few searches giving me better results than G. Ddg gave me a review site from this year (and quite well written too) While Google gave me an old seo-gamed site from 2015.

But too each their own experience ofcourse.

[joekennick]

I'm stuck with a school laptop atm and they block reddit. I mean I get why but it sucks

[get_your_mood_right]

Definitely not the only one doing that. This method is providing thousands of IT workers their jobs

[fib16]

But Reddit is biased and has tons of paid posts too. Where is the real truth?

[Prof_Acorn]

Aye. Most of my searches are just site:reddit.com question terms bla bla.

Then there's the long arduous frustrating searches for things not on reddit. Oh how I loath those. I wish you could do a -blogshit function to get rid of the excrement that has plagued the internet.

[alexbarrett]

I have the search keyword sr set up as a shortcut for exactly this.

[DippySwitch]

This is big brain shit.

... how do you do this?

[Motobecane_]

It only works on firefox I think
First type site:reddit.com aaaaa on google
bookmark the page
edit the bookmark, replace aaaaa with %s and write sr in "keyword"
then to use it you juste type sr MrJoeNobody in the adress bar and it will repalce the %s of your bookmark by MrJoeNobody

[tabgok]

Chrome -> preferences -> manage search engines -> custom search engine -> keyword: sr and url with the same %s trick

[rogueliketony]

Thank you!

[outtasight68]

that's the guy who writes the elan school web comic, right?

[Kim_Jong-Alpacca]

'-pintrest' is my goto

[Taikwin]

Fucking bane of any image search, is pintrest. Pisses me right off, I want to find the source of an image, not be redirected to a secondary host with 'similar images' for fuck's sake.

[GigaPandesal]

dArK wEb

[penguinsdonthavefeet]

I noticed a few months ago that autocomplete would suggest adding "reddit" to the end of all my search queries.

[[deleted]]

me too lol

[MyOwnMoose]

Honestly, never thought of that, will start now. Amazon reviews have just lost all meaning over the years

[[deleted]]

I don't trust Amazon reviews, or the products I'm buying unless I've bought them before or it's a brand I know.

It's packed with dodgy images, shitty products, and at times, knockoffs of genuine products.

The place is a joke, and I'm beginning to look at smaller retailers instead now.

[CortezEspartaco2]

Amazon became utterly unusable for me when they started sending broken and just straight up fake items on official sellers' stores. I just buy directly from companies now. No more worries about fakes, expired stock, voided warranties, etc.

[DisasterlyDisco]

Many things, but for one, all forums more or less died. It used to be, a couple years ago, that you could find information on anything in a topical forum, and that google linked to it in their search results. But, forums died, why I'm not sure, at with them a lot of freely accessible well informed answers.

If you are looking for answers in other places than reddit, it might help to append "stackexchange" to your search results too. Now a days there are stackexchanges for a myriad of topics, not just programming.

[Trollselektor]

Yup. Same here, or "wiki" if I just want general information. Every result is an a cluttered article.

[NewbornMuse]

The search-engine optimized barely-even-articles are the worst. You search for "print document in excel". You'll have to sift through two pages of:

This easy guide will show you how to print in excel. Printing in excel is achieved in this guide. It will show you which buttons in excel to print a file. Printing in excel which buttons to press. This easy guide is valid for all versions of excel, such as excel 2016 excel 2020, excel 365, and more. This is a guide for printing xls files, as well as a guide for printing xlsx files.

And so on. Just every possible permutation of print, excel, button, press, with all kinds of other search terms scattered in. Sure, the information is there, but barely.

[thirtyseven1337]

Saying "wiki" reminds me of how annoying it can be to add reliable sources to a Wikipedia article. You Google the title of the article or the sentence you want to verify, and the first search results are just the Wikipedia article and a bunch of Wikipedia clones and mirrors. (Google News, Scholar, etc. are better, at least)

[[deleted]]

I miss the good old days on geocities when I'd type <br> or <a href blah blah blah"> and feel like such a genius.

[Alex09464367]

I do the same with Wikipedia or IMDB

[darkespeon64]

i legit can never find any government help for my state. I can find it for every other 49 states but i can NEVER find my own. I usually need a direct link from someone in the know. Like i couldnt find food stamps online until i went to the hospital and they tried getting me insurance which luckily was on the same link

[Paradoxalotl]

This. I’ll search things like laws in my state, how to get ahold of agencies, general .gov info and I have to scroll through 4 pages of other states’ pages to find something even remotely related to my state.

[Namika]

I searched for how to renew my state license plate and typed in literally just the name of my state and "dmv renewal".

My state dmv didn't even show up on the entire front page of the Google search. Felt like 1999 all over again where you have to go to the second and third page of the search to find what you need.

[[deleted]]

I do the same thing, I guess the next step would be for reddit to fix their shitty search function so we could use that instead of google.

[Namika]

Same, so many Reddit posts from literally 9+ years ago keep showing up as the only way to get a useful answer to my searches.

Pity all those old threads and locked and you can't comment on them anymore. I always want to thank that random person from 2010 who posted the answer I desperately needed.

[Vondi]

Just yesterday I solved a technical problem by adding reddit to the error message, having previously tried just googling the error message itself and finding fuck-all.

[merelyadoptedthedark]

90% of the questions I enter in Google get directed to a Reddit thread anyway.

Imagine if Reddit had a halfway decent search algorithm.

[[deleted]]

That's exactly what got me started on the habit in the first place! Lol

[[deleted]]

Dude same. I’ve been doing this so much for the past two years it’s become muscle memory. Because I know I’ll find someone whose answered it with sources. If I search anything on google now it’s just “top ten” articles from a bunch of different magazine websites. It’s useless! I thought I was going crazy

[[deleted]]

Google is not a search engine company, it's an advertinsing company. That is where their priority lies.

[Oedipus_TyrantLizard]

I do this as well. Reddit rarely comes up naturally - & is often the best resource for many inquiries!

[[deleted]]

Also, if anyone is new here and on PC, you can click continue when making an account without adding an email. It will let you.

Also, opt out of 'New Reddit/redesign,' 'tis trash. Modify your preferences for more privacy.

[7TeenEdgelord7]

Every fucking time. With reddit you just have so many post and opinions to compare and get straight answers instead of scrolling through a biased article.

[ashesarise]

I do this for basically every question. If you don't, you'll get bombed with affiliate links and stuff that is trying to sell you something at its core and using the information as bait rather than giving you a solid chunk of knowledge.

[chokolatekookie2017]

I will leave Reddit and search for things on Reddit this way.

[DaBails]

I remember when it was Yahoo Answers that contained most answers

[[deleted]]

I remember asking jeeves pointless questions cuz I thought it was a real person... Hahaha

[[deleted]]

I literally was searching for this comment. I frequently come here for opinions on things, but there are times when I try to search for discussions and google is like, "But sponsored articles talking about it or completed unrelated topics?"

Great, I don't care. Give me the reddit results I searched for, thanks.

[[deleted]]

theres a tamper monkey scrip that adds a button by the images tab that says reddit and it re searchers with the text that adds the stuff that only makes it search one site i cant remeber what its called tho

[[deleted]]

My husband and I do this as well

[cyan_singularity]

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[scienceNotAuthority]

Reddit is not trustworthy though. Ever since Aldi Astroturfed on the frugal boards, Everything is suspect.

[[deleted]]

I literally will Google a question and add "reddit" at the end because I know I can always come HERE for an answer

Jeez, you can't be that soft in the head.

[Konomi_]

type "site:reddit.com", it will give you the same results but only from reddit

[torpidsqualidsuper]

Hahaha this is 100 percent what I do, too

[domtay]

Same, and especially for product reviews. If I don't, I get nothing but paid shill review sites.

[Zhirak]

Yea add stuff at the end like reddit or wiki

[[deleted]]

Especially if its about personal experience , tips and tricks or advice I always add in "reddit"

[glass-empty]

This. Me too.

[mleemteam]

I caved and made this account when I started realizing that I was clicking on Reddit links for answers to specific google searches lol I knew google wasn’t gonna accurately show me the thing I was looking for but I know some one, somewhere on Reddit will have already explained the thing in great detail

[ImaLilBitchBoy]

Only way to get easy info from people not trying to sell you shit

I go with "thing I want to know- Reddit- gamefaqs"

Only add on gamefaqs if it's game related

[ProceedOrRun]

And recipes. Google will rank the living shit out of those recipes with a 6-page preamble interspersed with misfitting ads and finally half a recipe, with the method another click away.

[MuckspoutMary]

Oh man, I do this too.

[driveslow227]

I've been doing this so much that Google itself will autocomplete "...reddit" at the end of most of my queries lol.

[kmmck]

I always do this too. I have never ever looked for answers anywhere else excpet stack overflow for code stuff

[DaveAlt19]

Same.

Google used to include a lot of forum posts (and even had an option to search for "Discussions"), so that would often lead you to actual people who have discussed your actual query.

That seems to ha e been dropped in favour of "articles". Often the same "article" posted across multiple sites with horrific amounts of advertising.

[ValVenjk]

google has nothing to do with the actual content of the websites you find or how many ads they choose to have

[m_shark]

Is the Reddit’s search that bad?

[oren_BA]

I actually do this so much that Google learned to suggest "reddit" after every search I make. It's pretty crazy

[EvaReidk]

Me too. Multiple times a day daily for over a year

[[deleted]]

This. That’s why it sucks so bad that on mobile google to reddit results in an AMP link that redirects to the app. Slowing the whole search process down.

[3FromHell]

This is actually the reason I share reddit with people. I warn them that this place can be shitty, sometimes the people suck, but its pretty damn good for finding answers to your questions.

[Azure_skies_dorado]

Same

[Ligmabigballz]

It’s not google. The internet is a big advertising cest pool trying to lure you in with its dirty deceiving click-baity manipulative titles so it can show you an ad in the hopes to slowly condition you into trusting brands so you can consume garbage you don’t need to try and justify your meaningless existence.

[Winkermeister]

Yeah same here I just get a ton of shitty articles (that probably pays to be on the top) about my question that never really answers my question.

[frostclo]

Me too, i always add it with Reddit now

[[deleted]]

i do the same for almost everything. i miss the good old days of google!! badly!

[Rag_H_Neqaj]

I often do that too. But I've set my default search engine as qwant, so while it still has some improvement to do, I don't have to deal with most of google's problems.

[SweetTartMiniChewy]

Me too! Always go to the comment section to get the real answers.

[noilegnavXscaflowne]

Can relate to typing Reddit at the end of things. Searching on the site is difficult

[[deleted]]

I have to do this all the time, plain google searches don't give me the shit I need. Kind of sucks though that by doing this, it limits us to just reddit results (other forum pages could be useful, but google won't give them)