As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.

I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.

Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.

  • FireTower@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The issue isn’t that reddit has all the answers the issue is that search engines like Google show you the websites that have been best optimized for search engines, not the most helpful ones.

    Ending searches with ‘reddit’ works because reddit is the largest group of forums on the web & forums typically are full of people knowledgeable on a specific topic that have good answers.

    The quality of returned search results IMO has degraded appreciably. When I search the same question as you posted the entire first page of results is long winded listicals. There’s a lot of seemingly helpful & succinct answers in that post you made but no one searching Google will find it if they enter the exact title.

    • alp@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      That’s often my issue, forums will have multiple real people with their own opinions based on their experience. With an article it’s one author who is only writing the article to attract clicks.

    • saltynuts420@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      People who write on reddit dont produce the info themselves instead they would have also reffered to some book / article (mostly articles) thus reading the articles will give you more info about the topic … just remember before reading the blog/article see the author and his/her qualification , most articles give a brief info about the writer at the top … just make sure that person is genuinely knowledgeable on the topic … also avoid AI written articles

      • FireTower@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        People on forums like Reddit absolutely can produce their own info. Nowadays it’s more often that those articles are based on posts written on sites like reddit.

    • _number8_@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      i’m honestly obsessed with how insanely bad it’s gotten. is there a video of the difference? i know for a fact it wasn’t this shitty before, the - sign would work.