Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything?
Supervisor194@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.
Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.
But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.
This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.
And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.
Reddit keeps asking me to use their app and they are very clearly making the mobile browser version worse and worse.
Just last week I couldn’t view a thread I found on Google without signing in. It wasn’t adult content and didn’t require verifying my age. The reason given was very vague and had something to do with the content not being vetted (despite being old).
The Reddit garden wall is already here and is currently being rolled out. For your own good, of course.
Probably this:
“Unreviewed Content
This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.”
Knew I could find it by searching for an in-theaters film followed by “DVD rip reddit”. Behold / old reddit link.
The sub exists to funnel people to a single TinyUrl. Checking the preview instead, I expect it (123movieshd dot club) is a malware distributor.
While reddit’s tactic is coercive, it also functions as a lazy way to fight the reach/effectiveness of spammers.
Replace the beginning of the url with old.reddit.com. this will get you in.
Sure, for now. They won’t keep that up forever.
Agreed, but it’s been working now for longer than I originally expected. I wonder if some part of their choice base totally relies on that being available…
Yeah it’s true. Too bad. Bye reddit.
Use Firefox and there are extensions that block the app request popup. Or you could use tampermonkey or something similar to do it.
I bet that doesn’t work with the login requirements.
The page still loads behind it, usually, there’s just a popup keeping you from accessing it. So I don’t see how they could stop you from just… removing the popup.
Also, starting in 2018 Google no longer actually searches for the words you entered. Instead, it tries to figure out “what you really mean” and shows results for that. See BERT
“… Google can no longer spider a significant amount…”
What?
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But I think that’s letting Google off the hook because when I search for things I do get hits, it’s just weird and I get terrible hits. Last week I was looking for something specific and I found five pages in the top 10 that were all variations on each other, to the point that I assume some of them were automatically generated but have no idea which is the actual original source, if any.
And then if I’m searching for something like song lyrics, the top five hits are all sites that require JavaScript to be enabled and AdBlock to be disabled. Of course Google could filter its rankings to bring sites like this out of the top 10.
So I agree with you that capitalism is a huge issue but one specific issue here is that the Google developers don’t care about things that we care about. And other companies such as Apple and Facebook are worse of course.
Aurix@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You really need to add Discord to this list as it is soaking up gigantic amounts of information about video games as a forum replacement. One could argue for actual community games like MMO’s it is perhaps slightly different, but for the majority it is a huge problem.
mesamunefire@lemmy.world 10 months ago
In 10 years, when we move off discord for “the next big thing” all that info will be gone yet again. It happened to slack and it will most likely happen to discord. None of it will be indexed too. Fun times.
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
Where are the data hoarders when you need them?
FractalsInfinite@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Tools for backing up servers already exist: github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter But unfortunately discord can’t be easily scraped in one coordinated attempt unlike reddit due to the massive number of private servers and existing verification/anti-bot mechanisms. As a result, only the communities that have data hoarders will be actually archived.
Dkarma@lemmy.world 10 months ago
But u can login to discord and if the room is public you can see the content. Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think the point is you can’t put a search term into a search engine and get results from some random Discord. No body is going to go trawling through Discords to then use the search function to potentially find information from it. Now, if chats were somehow archived and could then be searchable, different story, but I don’t think that’s what people using Discord want from Discord.
UnRelatedBurner@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
yeah, this is a problem. But in practice i found that if your searching for one niche problem and your only lead is discord, the people there are going to be kind and help.
I know the pain on having to join something’s discord to get info, but it’s usually fast after I join.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 10 months ago
You can see the content, but it isn’t categorized, tagged or organized in any way. If you’re looking for some specific information but you don’t know which server/channel it was discussed on, you’ll never find it.
AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah I can’t stand discord. Impossible to find anything, constantly feel like I’ve joined a conversation they had been in progress for months so have to scroll up ages to get any sort of context.
ax_the_dragon@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
Sidebar from someone who is probrbly just to old to know: How would I go about finding discords that are relevant to my intrests? I am a member on a few servers, but the discovery was always the other way around: I found the invite-link on a website/community that dealt with the topic I was intrested in.