Plenty Google Search users were appending “site:reddit.com” to their searches to avoid SEO and get actual human answers. This became less useful with the blackouts, and Google is actually addressing it - through a new feature called “Perspectives”. Allegedly the feature highlights forums and videos from social media (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora).
This means that those search users won’t beeline towards Reddit anymore. Instead there’s a reasonable chance that they end in Reddit’s competitors, including Youtube (owned by Alphabet, the same parent company as Google Search).
Given that 47% of the traffic of Reddit comes from organic search, this is going to hurt. A lot.
Interesting. I feel like site:reddit became the cheat code for actual answers but it makes sense that it would not be sustainable. Hopefully the reddit drama decentralizes this type of info and makes it more stable.
It’s a bit of off-topic, but what feels weird for me is that I’m probably using search engines in a way that almost nobody does - because not only I don’t use this “cheat code”, but I’ve actively uBlacklist’ed reddit from appearing in search. (When I want an answer I want an answer, not a bunch of redditors saying “I dun unrurrstand” or circlejerking.)
Still, a lot of people do it. For those I hope that the new feature becomes useful.
Depends on the kind of search. If you’re wondering what was newton’s second law, you can just Google that. If you’re having an issue where your steam deck virtual keyboard is not showing up when you press its shortcut, the top 20 non-reddit Google results will all be random SEO articles about the basic features of steam deck.
Google should just buy Reddit. They could augment their search with it and would have an awesome basis for their LLM stuff.
This is exactly why the Reddit blackout would have been so easy to win if people actually held their ground
Cory Doctorow talks about this, in How to Leave Dying Social Platforms:
They had a collective action problem. Each of them could figure out what worked best for them, but getting together to decide what was best for all of them was literally impossible.
In this case: giving up is the best for you, but holding your ground is the best for everyone. It’s a shame, really.
I feel without Reddit Google is often useless
Do you happen to have any practical example of a search that you performed with the “reddit trick” that returned considerably better results than one without the trick?
I’m just curious, mind you. I want to understand what I’m doing different from you guys.
I do for sure. For tech questions, forum threads tend to answer my question or lead to more things to dig into, as compared to sponsored or super amateur blogs with confidently give me mediocre or useless answers.
