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Reddit can't build a better search engine

292 pointsby rukshnover 3 years ago

87 comments

AkshatMover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve searched for Reddit in the past because Reddit is the only site where I can get community answers to an important question. In those cases, the <i>community</i> aspect mattered to me - for example, I recently moved to Boston, so I solicited Bostonian&#x27;s recommendations from r&#x2F;boston; my partner and I were having troubles, and I wanted to hear from people who&#x27;d gone through similar experiences; I wanted to learn about compiler construction and went looking for other smart folks who were interested in the same topic.<p>I would never do a code search on Reddit. I would never search for &quot;restaurants near me&quot; on Reddit. I would almost certainly never solicit medical advice from Reddit, or type in a new term I&#x27;d heard to get all the information about it, or try to shop for things from Reddit links. I just don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s what Reddit&#x27;s for.<p>That&#x27;s why I find both this response and the original so bizarre in their thesis. Search isn&#x27;t homogeneous, and, while I have noticed declining quality in a few areas I search frequently, those areas almost never overlap with my Reddit-specific search areas. Reddit wouldn&#x27;t replace my Google any time soon, even if it built a better search engine.
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conjecTechover 3 years ago
This thesis is off. It&#x27;s not as if Reddit just appeared on the internet yesterday. It&#x27;s been a place people look for this kind of info for a long time, and people have been trying to game it for just as long. And it already has a good search engine - that just happens to be Google. So it still leaves the question: why does Reddit still have such a high signal-to-noise ratio.<p>A few things I&#x27;ve noticed:<p>1. A lot of conversations happen before that many people are interested. Subreddits tend to attract mavens, and they often discuss things months or years before people really care (or the marketing team for whatever is being discussed is even looped in). Pay attention to when the posts you&#x27;re looking at occurred. In a lot of cases, they were there earlier than you&#x27;d expect.<p>2. There is incredible dispersion in where conversations on a topic occur. It&#x27;s not uncommon to have 10s or 100s of different communities discussing the same thing, and its not clear which is going to end up being the place people trust. Many of the sub-communities are also somewhat mutually exclusive(geography, android vs ios, etc), meaning it&#x27;s going to look incredibly insincere if the same account is posting in a bunch of them.<p>3. Reddit posts allow negative feedback in a way few other venues due, especially not pages optimized for SEO and controlled by a single entity.<p>4. It is one of the few platforms with an appetite for long-form content. It is almost an anti-Twitter. Meaningfully moving a Reddit discussion on a single popular post could take hours if it could be done at all. For communities with more lasting artifacts like a wiki, it could be practically impossible.<p>5. As others have pointed out, the subreddits aren&#x27;t controlled by and don&#x27;t have the same incentives as Reddit Inc. Optimization tools aren&#x27;t going to generalize well since what it takes to get to the top of each is different.
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Nowadoover 3 years ago
Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won&#x27;t end up being used to make money. It will get figured out.<p>I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it&#x27;s much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once <i>any</i> division in population is found, it becomes valuable instantly), classical business marketing (where once anyone makes purchasing decision informed by something, it becomes valuable), capital markets (where once anything can be used to predict anything about any company or asset class, it becomes valuable) and more personal scams (where once you figure out someone&#x27;s niche interest, it becomes valuable) there just isn&#x27;t anything left. Go ahead, try to find something.<p>Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because what else?, but if the method isn&#x27;t obvious, here&#x27;s what you do: you are hired by&#x2F;own small company making niche potato chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check &#x27;potato chips dip&#x27;, you google all you can find there and some of your ideas, you write down all top10 results and check every now and then (well, your SEO monitoring app does it for you). Whatever you find that allows for user input, you generate that input - accounts are cheap - and maybe do some external SEO (thus beating 99,9% of social media results online).<p>That&#x27;s it, it&#x27;s easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to audience for a price that&#x27;s lower than cost of what I just described. There will be edge cases, especially on international markets where value of time for various business owners differs vastly, which will lead to sites slowly getting more clogged up with ads, but that&#x27;s the general gist. If you can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes when you&#x27;re looking for something, then it would just be quite weird if nobody ever did it.
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ddtaylorover 3 years ago
&gt; However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites.<p>I help run a Reddit website and open source project for managing scheduled posts [1] and we see a lot of garbage there, sadly. Over the years the site has processed nearly half a million posts and has tens of thousands of registered Redditors. In the early days it was pretty cool, we had a lot of individual users with various interesting projects. I remember early on there were some musicians using it and a few book authors that would release their books one chapter at a time - using our service to schedule the posts so they didn&#x27;t have to do it manually.<p>But, as time went on, the entire platform has been just swamped with mostly live sex workers and people shilling bullshit products. I&#x27;m not judging the sex workers or saying they shouldn&#x27;t be allowed on the platform and we don&#x27;t ban them, but I would say now literally 99&#x2F;100 of new users are just trying to push their Only Fans accounts to porn subreddits. Regarding the weird product shills, we&#x27;ve seen a few really odd campaigns. There was one guy who would post to various left-leaning and &quot;green&quot; oriented subreddits on the terrible nature of plastics while also promoting his own metal straw sales. Again, none of it is illegal and I&#x27;m not even sure if any of it is unethical or immoral since it really depends on if you think people are doing these things in bad faith, etc.<p>Either way, the project has for sure taken a backseat for us. If the server stays up and everything works, cool, if not, that&#x27;s fine too. I have no interest in trying to monetize the service anymore whereas in the early days we took donations.<p>My point is the world of gamifying and commercializing Reddit content is already very very well established and there are large players doing it at a very large scale. If you measure it the porn industry is virtually all of it, but if you exclude them and look a bit harder you&#x27;ll find other industries that have also carved out their niche in exploiting the platform.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cronnit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cronnit.com</a>
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bjarnehover 3 years ago
&gt; I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results.<p>I&#x27;m old enough to remember when Google came, and the main difference was this:<p>With Google you did not have to flip through 3 pages of completely unrelated search results; that were paid for. Google used to display advertisements on the right as well, i.e. not among the regular search results.<p>This made Google so much better (and more popular) then their competition.
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Finnucaneover 3 years ago
But the practice of appending &#x27;reddit&#x27; to your Google search isn&#x27;t depending on Reddit building a better search engine. It&#x27;s using Google&#x27;s search engine, and trying to direct it to a database that you hope has the answer you&#x27;re looking for. So there&#x27;s that. Of course, if that practice became widespread, then people could still try to stuff Reddit posts with junk in the hope that it gets picked up by Google in these searches, and then the Reddit folks would have to try to filter that out.
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jrussbowmanover 3 years ago
I built <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unscatter.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unscatter.com</a> using Reddit to source links for the search index. Last year I added Twitter as another source.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a &quot;better&quot; search engine. It&#x27;s a different lens through which to search. Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about. This is why I limit my index to articles that have popped in my Reddit&#x2F;Twitter input in the last 30 days, deleting anything older.<p>I&#x27;ve actually had it up for years now, just don&#x27;t know what to do with it. Been focused on my career in IT rather than entrepreneurism because well, life. I can say just this morning I saw &quot;Stanytsia Luhanska&quot; pop as a trending term on the front page of Unscatter and at the time mainstream media has not picked up the story of the school being hit by Russian shells.<p>I think over all the quality results still come from Reddit. Twitter often gets gamed and I see content terms pop up in the trending list. However, Twitter overnight (my time, US East) gets a more international flavor with lots of Korean and other Asia Pac country content bubbling to the top during that time because of Twitter.
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ThinkBeatover 3 years ago
A lot of &quot;influencers&quot; get paid good money to shill on Reddit.<p>It has a huge social media site. Of course, it is not ignored by the industry. Products, fads and politics.<p>Over the last several years it has become quite infested.<p>All is not lost.<p>There are some really good smaller subreddits. For smaller subreddits who have been around for a long time social meia influencers are easier to spot.<p>Some subreddits are so focused on an obscure niche that it is not worth money to try.<p>Well paid reddit influencers are well trained in &quot;propaganda&quot;. One might have several accounts and the information comes &quot;organic&quot; from a &quot;group effort&quot;. Some will not even name a product directly but give enough hints.<p>You also have negative influencers that work had to hurt the credibility of others and brand.<p>&gt;Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge.
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Trasterover 3 years ago
I completely disagree with some of the points here. There seems to be this weird assumption from people that Reddit is some organic source of information that hasn&#x27;t been polluted by advertisers and SEO. But the truth is that it absolutely has, the difference is that the way you game the system is different. Google is this crazy algorithm and no one really knows how it works, so people just throw shit at it. Keyword spamming, link farms, etc. All this auto-generated content. It&#x27;s much more difficult to manipulate Google, but as an algorithm google doesn&#x27;t object to people trying. The result is an obvious explosion of rubbish that raises the noise floor.<p>Reddit is different, they don&#x27;t have algorithms. They have moderators. You don&#x27;t need to figure out some crazy complicated way of manipulate things, you just have to either bribe or trick a couple of unpaid part time staff. And we&#x27;ve seen this so many times - moderators who use their position for their own gain. Now the result is different, this is what&#x27;s misleading. On reddit because it&#x27;s all manually moderated spamming is heavily penalized. So you don&#x27;t get the noise floor of rubbish content. What you do get though, is highly unreliable information about anything that could be monetized.<p>It&#x27;s exactly the same way on twitter, your energy company will be perfectly happy treating you like crap and keeping you on hold for 3 hours, or your airline company will throw your bags into a skip in Timbuktu and tell you you&#x27;re on your own. But suddenly if you have a following on twitter and complain you get the red carpet treatment. Why? Because they&#x27;ve found a <i>very</i> easy way of cheating their customer service reputation.
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CSSerover 3 years ago
This is a weird article to me. I somehow agree with the conclusion but disagree with all of its points.<p>Unless my memory is failing me (possible, it’s late), it straw mans the article it’s referencing by implying Reddit would want to do something like that anyway. It also fails to offer a compelling narrative for what makes Reddit good to me because frankly, and I feel that a lot of people seem to be overlooking this here too, Reddit has plenty of its own problems.<p>Reddit is owned by Condé Nast and is largely used as a content mill to prop up its existing properties. Reddit is dominated by the Pareto principle. 80% of its content is generated by a very small subset of users. Reddit doesn’t have the best track record for free expression. Many subreddits have crazy moderators that volunteer for some Machiavellian rush and use their power to stifle or twist the narrative of public sentiment. Reddit doesn’t want to kill the golden goose, so when this kind of controversy arises or when controversial subreddits crop up they kill it with fire to protect their investment. Lastly, Reddit users more than half a decade ago were already lambasting the amount of corporate shilling and guerilla advertising that takes place on Reddit daily. A lot of this is, in fact, orchestrated by those users I mentioned who produce 80% of the content because yes, they have discovered a financial incentive to do so.<p>I wouldn’t deny that Reddit has any sincere users any more than I would deny that we have any sincere users here (I’m certainly not getting paid for this), but I’ve been a bit perturbed by the amount of whitewashed, positive vibes Reddit seems to be getting around here lately. I stick Reddit on the end of search queries too, but I feel like I still wade into results with a similar level of skepticism to that which I carry around most of the rest of the web.
notRobotover 3 years ago
Reddit doesn&#x27;t really need to build a search engine, they could just have an algolia instance like HN does: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;</a>.<p>While not perfect, it does a pretty good job, in my experience.<p>However, the article makes a valid point -- the moment people start using it heavily, we&#x27;ll get a reddit comment equivalent of SEO, with keyword stuffing and whatnot.
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streamofdigitsover 3 years ago
Greed killed the golden goose and this article points this out in a simple and convincing way.<p>&gt; The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge<p>This doesn&#x27;t immediately provide a solution because knowledge sharing does need infrastructure (which needs to be developed and maintained etc.) But as the (relatively) tiny budgets of organizations like wikimedia indicate, if you have the right incentives less might be more.<p>There is room for money to made in the digital economy, lots of it actually, but it will require us to pull the plug on adtech and all the ways it has degenerated. In broad brush we need to cleanly bifurcate into 1) trully free commons and 2) pay-to-play services that respect and are accountable to the client&#x2F;user
themodelplumberover 3 years ago
Thanks for posting op, it&#x27;s interesting to think about.<p>&gt; Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge.<p>I would offer a bit of a different perspective here, I think maybe even most do it for what you could call self-soothing.<p>For example, a lot of people share knowledge, but it&#x27;s _their knowledge_, which can also be defined as _sharing their subjective past_ and that&#x27;s known to be a very soothing thing for people who may even be troubled by the unknown in their personal lives. Hop online, boom, you&#x27;re a domain expert in your own past. Find a place that&#x27;s _about your past_, be it &#x2F;r&#x2F;linux or &#x2F;r&#x2F;formula1 or whatever, and there you go, it&#x27;s comfy. You generally get an upvote + reply vibes dopamine bonus just for being there, due to your relevant past.<p>So, Reddit&#x27;s sooth-sayers (so to speak) are kind of lazy but incentivized-lazy in some ways, which I think can also speak to some issues with the platform surrounding cognitive blind spots and what some here have called the echo chamber effect. That&#x27;s an opportunity for a new search engine, in some ways, but it also may offer insights to new services that could be even more effective.<p>&gt; And there is no financial incentive associated with it. [posting on Reddit]<p>There is though. I mean I&#x27;ve myself been financially incentivized into doing it, as have probably many, many others. Nothing sneaky, even.<p>You&#x27;ve got people posting their stuff all over the place, and the more community or indie or niche it is, the more welcomed is the post-as-advertisement or comment-as-advertisement. And that&#x27;s not even going into corporate efforts to operate on the platform, which can be very subtle.<p>&gt; However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity,<p>Perhaps--but Google was _really_ good for a very long time. That was worth a lot to millions of people.<p>I like to think that in the future, an ecosystem-mindset toward incentive systems could really help, like planning for different emergent systems that incentivize good results.<p>Anyway, fun to think about, thanks again.
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halotropeover 3 years ago
Despite all of its drawbacks like the obnoxious mobile app pushing and deterioration of communities after they pass a certain size it is still the closest equivalent I know of for the early 2000&#x27;s forum culture. It is the only social network I know (apart from HN) that does not exclusively deals in bite-sized dopamine hits.<p>Lets hope that the upcoming IPO does not compromise the incentives there.
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caaqilover 3 years ago
&gt; However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now<p>I mean, you don&#x27;t have to imagine this, it already happens. People <i>do</i> game Reddit to inject ads, create bots that farm karma then use it to post their content and get them to the front page, etc. The only problem is that (at least some) redditors are incredibly sensitive to this and will go full internet detectives on you. See &#x2F;r&#x2F;HailCorporate.
buro9over 3 years ago
There is already a great search engine, it is Google.<p>The problem is that it contains an overwhelming volume of spam and auto-generated sites.<p>To solve that, we all use the best search engine and apply site filters. Sites where we know other humans may have already discussed it.<p>We filter for forums - and Reddit is the largest of those - and we filter for specific websites we already trust.<p>Sometimes I filter `site:news.ycombinator.com companyname`, sometimes it&#x27;s `site:dcrainmaker.com best gps watch`, sometimes it&#x27;s `site:lfgss.com bottom bracket cable guide de rosa`.<p>But if I don&#x27;t know about a specialist website, then it&#x27;s `site:reddit.com searchterm`.<p>The search engine exists, it&#x27;s just full of garbage with no effective way to search minus the garbage.<p>I&#x27;d take another DMOZ, a human curation of specialist sites. Then I&#x27;d have something better than Reddit too... I&#x27;d have the right filter to make every search useful.
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skilledover 3 years ago
As someone who appends &quot;Reddit&quot; to his Google queries - SEO spammers have already caught up on this trend. I&#x27;ve seen it on several occasions that some blog site will have the word &quot;Reddit&quot; in the title.
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nemothekidover 3 years ago
&gt;<i>I was too young to use Google when it first got started</i><p>This statement aged me 10 years
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raszover 3 years ago
&gt;Reddit can&#x27;t build a better search engine<p>Reddit cant build any search functionality whatsoever. Current search is so broken It cant even find my own posts.
superfrankover 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve said it before and I&#x27;ll say it again... I think building better search goes against everything Reddit wants to be. Reddit doesn&#x27;t want to be Google or Wikipedia. Reddit wants to be a mix between Discord, TikTok, and Instagram.<p>The redesign they did years ago pushed a more Instagram like design. Things like chat and rPan are meant to keep you on the site interacting with other users in real time. Their new video player is just a TikTok rip off. They give away awards every day and started pushing award karma in hopes that you&#x27;ll give them to other users. Reddit wants you on their site, interacting with other users in real time and building a better search goes against that goal.<p>If I&#x27;m looking for a new pair of boots, there&#x27;s two paths I can take on the reddit site. I can search &quot;best boots&quot; or I can go make a post on &#x2F;r&#x2F;boots. If their search is fantastic and I find a post that&#x27;s 2 years old, there may be some great information there, but I&#x27;m probably not going to comment. Even if I do comment, I&#x27;m probably not going to get a lot of responses. If their search is shit (intentionally or unintentionally) it pushes me toward making my own post and drives up their engagement metrics.<p>It would be a massive undertaking to improve their search and there&#x27;s very little incentive. Reddit wants users who just want to browse and that&#x27;s not what the users coming in from a specific Google search are doing.
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skywhopperover 3 years ago
“most of the sites back [when Google was created] were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information.”<p>This is a very bad misinterpretation of the history. At the time, we’d already passed the inflection point of most websites being just for sharing information (that probably happened in 1995). Traditional search engines like Lycos and AltaVista were being overwhelmed by SEO spam. I remember having given up on most searches for anything remotely commercial.<p>What made Google so revolutionary was that it worked around that with a very different algorithm that relied on incoming links and site reputation. Of course the spammers figured that out soon enough, and Google worked hard to stay ahead of things for a long time.<p>But now what we’re seeing is that Google has captured itself in the SEO game, and the incentives to continue investing in providing a high quality search engine are mostly gone. Google makes money off of showing you ads, and getting you to click on ads, and getting you to use other Google services that show you ads. And the ads they sell are a lot smaller and more tightly controlled search space than the spammy web. And they are more concerned with who you are and what you’ve been up to than what you are actually looking for in the moment.<p>I agree that Reddit won’t be replacing Google as a general purpose search engine, but eventually Google will become so user hostile that alternatives will emerge. It’ll just take longer than we want.
voldacarover 3 years ago
&gt;So how can we fix the system? The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue.<p>Different solution:<p>- Make a search engine that is actually good. Blacklist all SEO spam such as pinterest, allow complex queries, restrict by date, site, regex, etc<p>- Charge 1 cent per search, or as much as is necessary<p>Why has nobody done this? What am I missing?<p>I would totally use this. And if the pricing were correct, you wouldn&#x27;t need a captcha and could just expose it as an api for bots
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trinovantesover 3 years ago
Building a good search engine is hard<p>It gets worse if the content you&#x27;re trying to index are labeled with the same titles like &quot;me_irl&quot;. While they&#x27;re usually just pointless memes, there are occasionally a few gems that I would like to find again to share with friends but it&#x27;s basically impossible with such poor signals. I think it&#x27;s a bit sad that those rare gems are essentially lost and forgotten.
ALittleLightover 3 years ago
When I append &quot;reddit&quot; to a search term for something it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m looking for the opinions of mavens. For example, I needed a flashlight recently and rather than just buy the first flashlight on Amazon I instead searched &quot;flashlight reddit&quot;, found the subreddit for flashlight enthusiasts, scanned their wiki and posts about what to buy and then just bought what seemed like their top recommendation for my usecase. It took a few minutes more, but now, I don&#x27;t just have <i>a</i> flashlight, I have a flashlight that people who care about flashlights think is a good flashlight.<p>I think the reason reddit building a better search engine wouldn&#x27;t help them is that it&#x27;s already pretty darn easy to just add &quot;reddit&quot; to a search and, at least for me personally, I don&#x27;t do it that often. Typing &quot;reddit&quot; at the end of my search seems a lot easier and faster than going to reddit and typing my query into their search.<p>Also, contrary to the blog post, I think people have always tried to game both search results and make money on reddit.
not2bover 3 years ago
This is exactly right: if Reddit ever decided to build a search engine they&#x27;d wind up destroying their site, because everyone would try to game the results and fill Reddit with crap to do it.<p>The point it is that search engines are adversarial: people who are skilled and determined are actively trying to replace good results with their results.
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johnny35over 3 years ago
This take doesn&#x27;t make any sense to me.<p>&gt; Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments &gt; are doing it to share their knowledge. And there is no financial incentive &gt; associated with it. They know that do it to share their knowledge.<p>Ok, that&#x27;s why people are Googling for &quot;xyz reddit&quot;...<p>&gt; However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that &gt; there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, &gt; people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are &gt; now. SEO stuffed websites.<p>There&#x27;s nothing in this article explaining how the existence of better search on Reddit would provide different incentives than the very popular search engine for Reddit that is being used today (Google). What is this &quot;financial opportunity&quot; that doesn&#x27;t already exist that will spell doom?
never_a-pickleover 3 years ago
Reddit results are not organic at all but maybe appears to be on the surface.<p>Subs have their own &quot;reddit&quot; brands in accordance to the topic. They also have their own &quot;reddit&quot; opinions shared among almost every sub with enough people in it for justify propaganda.<p>I already did my own informal research on this - reddit has transitioned into consumption. I went sub by sub for thousands of posts, even a few years ago, and found that at least 75% of the selection of hobby subs I chose were related to the consumption of products within that hobby, not the active participation and knowledge translation within that hobby. You&#x27;d think camping subs would be talking about camping? Sure, see the sidebar for basic info. However, what you&#x27;ll really see is 80 of the top 100 posts of the day will be pictures of various products within different backgrounds&#x2F;settings.
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marginalia_nuover 3 years ago
I think people give too SEO too much credit. SEO is a big problem as long as there is only <i>one</i> big search engine, with one algorithm. That allows absurd specialization to abuse the idiosyncrasies of that search engine. That&#x27;s just how it goes with monocultures though.<p>I&#x27;ve had very little problem identifying SEO spam by just not being Google and promoting other values than they do. Since the search engine spammers are very mindful to follow every one of google&#x27;s best practices, then you can effectively find the rest of the internet by just punishing sites that do not, in some way, follow Google&#x27;s rules.<p>Unencrypted HTTP? Bring it. Poorly optimized for mobile? Don&#x27;t mind if I do. Weird looking URL? This is gonna be good! Et cetera etc.<p>You can also weed out a lot of this nonsense by looking at where websites created by humans link. Rarely do they link to spam.
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zemoover 3 years ago
&gt; Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge.<p>people post to Reddit (and here) not to share their knowledge but because they get a little squirt of dopamine from upvotes and downvotes and replies.
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randomsilenceover 3 years ago
Actually they can and only they can.<p>As noticed, once Reddit builds a search engine, people will flood it with spam. But Reddit is in the unique position that they can figure out who is a genuine user. They have the ip addresses of all the submitters and they have the source redditor of each downvote.<p>They can still show the comments from VPNs and such. But for their search engine, they can exclusively rely on using the signals from verified IPs.<p>Instead of building it themselves, they could cooperate with Microsoft and Facebook for the search technology and to know each user even further. Those signals, combined with the downvotes to identify spammers, could create the foundation for Google&#x27;s nightmares.
mdomsover 3 years ago
This argument makes precisely zero sense. We&#x27;ve already established that people are using site:reddit.com in search queries so the incentive already exists. And frankly Reddit is already at least 50% astro turfed. But search results on Reddit are still more useful for many queries.<p>It&#x27;s also worth noting that unlike Google, Reddit has total control over the content that they&#x27;re indexing. If they detect bad SEO actors they have far more power to influence them or shut them down completely because they&#x27;re indexing a platform they control. Google is indexing the open web.
scherover 3 years ago
Reddit search results could be better. For example, it&#x27;d be great to search only in comments, or in post titles, descriptions. Now, it searches posts only. The subreddits search shows some relevant subreddits by their names, but the other results aren&#x27;t valid. E.g. type any search query and there&#x27;s a high chance that r&#x2F;teenagers are there too. There could be no fancy algorithms, just give more filters. Meanwhile, people try to build websites around Reddit to leverage their search(what I do).
jmyeetover 3 years ago
I just don&#x27;t agree with this trope that Google is &quot;bad&quot; or even quantitatively &quot;worse&quot;. It&#x27;s almost always based on:<p>1. Ads in search results. I don&#x27;t agree with the premise that ads are <i>necessarily bad</i>. Someone selling a thing may be the best result for a search. As long as ads are labelled as such I&#x27;m fine with this;<p>2. Anecdotes. I can match you anecdote for anecdote;<p>3. Personalization: it depends on what&#x27;s included but knowing you&#x27;re in Chicago changes what&#x27;s most relevant when yous earch for &quot;auto repair shop&quot;; and<p>4. Astroturfing, content farms and SEO gaming. To me this is the biggest problem and will be forever an arms race. The article touches on this. It&#x27;s really a product of views (ie display advertising) and clicks (ie affiliate programs) generating revenue and any search engine will have this problem.<p>The lesson you should take from using &quot;site:reddit.com&quot; or &quot;reddit&quot; or any other term to Google search like this is evidence of just how hard search is. The 21st century is littered with the corpses of dead &quot;Google killer&quot; search startups.<p>The article (correctly IMHO) mentions Reddit doesn&#x27;t get as much attention SEO-wise and that&#x27;s actually what can make it useful but it misses the main point: there are communities that form around niche topics (eg vacuum cleaners) that are generally resistant to astroturfing.
lamontcgover 3 years ago
&gt; I was too young to use Google when it first got started, but according to many, in the beginning, Google had better or more accurate search results. One reason for this was the fact that most of the sites back then were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information.<p>&gt; But I think all can agree that Google results reduced when people started to game the algorithm and create search engine optimized garbage websites.<p>Well not quite.<p>There were piles of SEO crap sites being produced in 2001. Google used to manage to react to any new exploit and improve their results. They actively fought that battle for at least a decade or so. They used to win.<p>It is only more recently that they seem to have given up.
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mouzoguover 3 years ago
Google is an advertising company. So it makes sense that their search engine (and youtube) exist as a platform for advertising. It really is that simple.<p>Reddit don&#x27;t want people to be able to easily find information. They want to make it just easy enough that you wont leave but hard enough that it will take you longer to find what you need. They are all about retention and finding that balance between aggravation and engagement. Twitter is the same.
noncomlover 3 years ago
I wonder if is Google the defacto search engine because they actually cannot be beaten or is it because it&#x27;s virtually impossible for a new player to &quot;scrape&quot; the internet as easy as Google does.<p>Websites, including Reddit, are happy to give all their data to Google bots, but if anyone else tries to crawl them they will get black-listed very fast even if they follow the robots.txt rules.
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1vuio0pswjnm7over 3 years ago
&quot;However, once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites.&quot;<p>Reddit already has a &quot;search engine&quot; to search reddit.com. People used to call this &quot;site search&quot;. As Google became popular, some websites gave up on site search and outsourced it to Google. Nevertheless, plenty of websites still have their own search engine. They do not use Google.<p>AFAICT, Reddit does not use Google for site search. Let&#x27;s put the premise in the author&#x27;s title to the test. Someone suggest some search terms. We will then search (a) using Reddit&#x27;s site search and (b) using Google search with &quot;site:reddit.com&quot;. We can then compare the results from (a) and (b).
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bradyatover 3 years ago
I see reddit as a replacement for the old &quot;forum&quot; search function that Google used to have. It&#x27;s an easy first place to check and see if someone has information able a very specific niche.<p>An example would be something like the UKVisa subreddit. I want to know if someone else has run into the same issue that I had with the god awful 3rd party visa processing website that the UK have. I&#x27;m not able to find that information of Google - the best I can hope for is something along the lines of a general guide for how to process a visa from an immigration law firm. But on Reddit there is almost certainly someone who has run into the exact same issue, as well as others who have been through the process and can answer from first hand knowledge.
apiover 3 years ago
Kagi is the search engine I&#x27;m most excited about. I&#x27;m using it as my default now and will pay when it exits beta.<p>The placement of financial incentive at the user should help them invest in combatting spam and returning good results. The results are already pretty solid.<p>Money easily creates perverse incentives in media. The advertising driven model is the easiest to scale. You lose the friction of signups and people don&#x27;t want to pay anyway. They&#x27;ll happily blow $50&#x2F;month at Starbucks but $10&#x2F;month for media is too much. Unfortunately the advertising model places the incentive around capturing user <i>attention</i> rather than delivering anything useful, so it incentivizes the media equivalent of empty carbs and sugar.
stefsover 3 years ago
i remember history very differently. the old search engines before google analyzed only page content in isolation, which lead to SEO sites appending invisible blocks of keywords at the bottom or putting loads of barely related keywords in the page title.<p>google was the one that managed to break this cycle with pagerank. suddenly, the spamword filled trash sites were worthless because nobody (of worth) linked to them. on the other hand blogs flourished, because their structure worked well with pagerank.<p>it took a long time for the spammers to re-build their networks and strategies to adapt to the situation, but even then having a well-written and regularly updated company weblog usually did more for your search ranking than other SEO trickery.
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nicolasmelo12over 3 years ago
Although this article has many valid points, it&#x27;s important to say that Reddit is mostly used by english speakers. (Maybe 1&#x2F;3 of the world, i think that probably less). I&#x27;m a software developer and i think that most of the time i prefer websites like stack overflow or github issues directly.<p>As a software developer i see that reddit answers most questions like &quot;Is it better to use A over B?&quot;, &quot;Why using C can be bad for my code?&quot;. It&#x27;s for questions that are more open and less exact or technical.<p>So yeah, i don&#x27;t see reddit being used as a search engine because english speakers are not even half of the world and it definitely don&#x27;t answers most daily basis questions.
roomeyover 3 years ago
&gt; One reason for this was the fact that most of the sites back then were indie websites, which did not care about SEO and money and created websites for sharing information.<p>I was around when it started. Let me tell you there was a massive amount of SEO going on back then. The big driver to Google back then was that it was a crawler not directory, so you could get newer results. But most importantly the search was clean and the landing page was empty.<p>All the other search pages were so rammed with crap and asking to install ask Jeeves toolbars. Google was minimal.<p>Webrings were the main way to find indie sites for me anyway. Digg was always good too
sasaf5over 3 years ago
&gt; I’d still prefer a targeted ad over a random ad that is unrelated to me.<p>No, a million times no. A targeted ad requires my personal information being collected, and the resulting assumption of my needs may be offensive and even dangerous.<p>I prefer a random ad. Or better, a place where I can just search the product I want in detail.
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thematrixturtleover 3 years ago
This is too dismissive. Reddit users and communities have history, links, upvotes etc, which is hugely valuable, and it should be possible to implement a PageRank-type system to separate the signal from the noise and surface the most valuable results. Now that noise is still considerable, thanks to karma farming etc (did you know you can buy and sell Reddit accounts?), but humans can usually tell apart the shills from the legit posters and automating this doesn&#x27;t seem unsurmountable if Reddit cared. Which, oddly, they don&#x27;t seem to.
MaxBarracloughover 3 years ago
&gt; once Reddit creates a search engine, and once people get to know that there is an opportunity to game the system and create a financial opportunity, people will abuse that system and we will be back to the place where we are now. SEO stuffed websites.<p>reddit already has a search feature. It&#x27;s garbage, but it does exist.<p>Also, plenty of people already use Google to search reddit. If reddit integrated a Google-powered search feature, would that be a game-changer? I doubt it. What would be the difference compared to if they implemented their own search?
picturover 3 years ago
When I saw the reddit example, I thought of quora. Quora will never be a search engine because all users need to stand out is to add something. and what is usually added is garbage.
spiderfarmerover 3 years ago
I sometimes wonder if we would have had very good search engines if one of the Tech Giants invested in a <i>huge</i> amount of manual information entry&#x2F;organization instead of optimising around spam and junk websites.<p>Like Encyclopedia Brittanica, but on steroids. With 500.000 editors and a couple millions volunteers instead of a couple hundred editors.<p>Google has 135.000 people on staff right now, all very highly paid. They could have a massive advantage if they had their own unique dataset.
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revskillover 3 years ago
SEO tricks is shit to me.<p>The content itself is the SEO.<p>If i were building the search engine, i&#x27;ll just ignore all nonsense website with their tricks as well as clunky tracking script in their header.
sb057over 3 years ago
This misses the mark, Reddit&#x27;s search is completely useless for any sort of query, and has been for at least a decade. Searching for a post&#x27;s title verbatim but without quotes will frequently return completely unrelated results. That combined with the fact that Reddit constitutes something like 90% of downtime of top 10 global websites and that their video player is, by all accounts, terrible, tells me they have institutional technical problems.
zeruchover 3 years ago
They don&#x27;t have to. They just have to be a better option to look for acceptable &quot;answers&quot; (and can be acquired even via google anyway, at least for now).<p>The real underlying point is the degradation of <i>Google&#x27;s</i> default results; manipulation of boolean syntax to filter for certain characteristics and Google becomes a tool to find answers elsewhere rather than from Google&#x27;s own results directly.
chaoz_over 3 years ago
Reddit would need strong anti-fraud&#x2F;anti-spam expertise, because currently most of BlackHat SEO masters are focused on Google.<p>Subreddits with their own moderators can work for the current traffic (and probably 10x that), but the quality of the platform is likely to degrade if reddit received &gt;10% overall google search traffic.<p>I am not saying Reddit can&#x27;t do that, and I would be really happy to see it happen.
nitwit005over 3 years ago
The payoff of doing SEO probably wouldn&#x27;t be anywhere near what it is for Google search. I suspect many reddit users don&#x27;t know it has a search feature, or tried it exactly once. The basic usage is scrolling through posts. No matter how good their search becomes, the thing you&#x27;d want to optimize is presumably be getting onto people&#x27;s front page.
boatsieover 3 years ago
I think this article misses the fact that Google polices spam&#x2F;seo hacks via software automation whereas Reddit (in theory) polices it via crowdsourcing and moderators. These volunteers are super vigilant as they seem to treat the subreddits as their turf or property. If we could downvote google results and share those with others, that would be closer.
didipover 3 years ago
I still remembered Panda change they made in 2011.<p>It is vividly burned in my memory because I used to work for one of those trash website that polluted Google search results.<p>When Panda came out, I was like… what took you so long (also, time to get a new job).<p>For whatever reason, Google is too shy to pull that move again.<p>Just imagine, Pinterest could easily be obliterated in one random day.
silent_calover 3 years ago
I think this is actually a good argument. Once you build a search algorithm then people start trying to exploit it for visibility. It creates a reward system that conflicts with Reddit&#x27;s voting system that&#x27;s already there.<p>I just wish Reddit would get rid of all the NSFW content on the site, it makes for a juvenile atmosphere.
srmarmover 3 years ago
&gt; So how can we fix the system? The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue.<p>Which makes it a shame that Google is in the business of pushing ad revenue rather than search.
FL410over 3 years ago
<i>Reddit posts are good because the people who create these posts or make comments are doing it to share their knowledge.</i><p>…<p><i>So how can we fix the system? The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge</i><p>OK, so append Reddit to the google search, got it.
TimLelandover 3 years ago
Reddit may not be able to but using Google to search Reddit works great :).<p>Here is a simple site that you may want to bookmark.<p>Whenever you start to type goo.. just visit <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gooreddit.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gooreddit.com&#x2F;</a>
lkxijlewlfover 3 years ago
A lot of people don&#x27;t use search in Reddit. They&#x27;ll ask the same questions over and over (&quot;Why is &quot;other&quot; taking <i>all my storage</i>???&quot;).<p>Reddit could make a better search engine than google and it wouldn&#x27;t matter.
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smrtinsertover 3 years ago
They&#x27;re already aware of it. There&#x27;s astroturfing, brigading etc. Reddit moderators help a lot, but the community itself points out bots or suspicious accounts. That cleans out a lot.
wooptooover 3 years ago
Let&#x27;s bring back the old dmoz.org [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DMOZ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DMOZ</a>
fractal618over 3 years ago
REDDIT POPULARITY ON GOOGLE TRENDS <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;oAGwCZc.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;oAGwCZc.png</a>
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varsketizover 3 years ago
I know of companies that employ hundreds of people to do &quot;webutation&quot; or &quot;guerilla marketing&quot;. That involves creating a bunch of accounts on social networks (reddit as well) and posting positive info about their product in relevant places. I have zero confidence in any product review on the internet, if I don&#x27;t know the poster personally.<p>When I was younger, I thought verifying identity to connect to the internet would be against my rights or something.<p>Now I think this would be great, though probably impossible to coordinate around the world.
jarrenaeover 3 years ago
Search Reddit via Google: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchbettr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchbettr.com&#x2F;</a>
petenickover 3 years ago
“The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue.”<p>The best way to fix the system is to prioritize the best content irrespective of monetization strategy.<p>Search engines should not penalize websites trying to make money.<p>They should penalize spammy websites that add little value but know how to game the system.<p>The degree to which the creator monetizes their content should bear little weight with a search engine that is trying to serve the best content.
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brenelsonover 3 years ago
I definitely agree with this one, that&#x27;s why I use Google search even though I&#x27;m searching for a specific reddit content.
jiveturkeyover 3 years ago
insightful.<p>Even Amazon can&#x27;t build a better search engine. Besides reddit, I always now have to use Google to find specific products on Amazon. I can&#x27;t understand why Amazon doesn&#x27;t return them. These same products are not discoverable on Amazon by browsing either. But somehow Google is able to catalog them.<p>eg: &#x27;ohto ceramic refill blue&#x27;
axiosgunnarover 3 years ago
So I can kill Reddit if a build a search engine for it that becomes popular and Reddit users start optimizing for that?
naveen99over 3 years ago
There is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redditsearch.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redditsearch.io&#x2F;</a>
jdrcover 3 years ago
that&#x27;s just false. I often want to advertise in subreddits but either the mods don&#x27;t allow anyone to advertise or the reddit ads are really crappy and juvenile. If i could have a spot on the sidebar of reddit search results i d happily pay more than i do for their cpc ads
mhh__over 3 years ago
Either the problem is very hard or reddit&#x27;s technology culture is crap.<p>If they go public I would not be bullish
zagrebianover 3 years ago
Reddit can’t even make a rich text editor for comments that isn’t borked in browsers.
jaimex2over 3 years ago
Remember when Google said it was going to punish blatant SEO?<p>Must have been April 1st.
pyuser583over 3 years ago
Reddit organizes information hierarchically. No shame in that.
stiltzkinover 3 years ago
Astroturfing alone Reddit is not a good search engine.
ameliusover 3 years ago
FOSS can&#x27;t build a better search engine either.
syamilmjover 3 years ago
Maybe Google should just add an upvote button.
Skiiingover 3 years ago
The lack of a Reddit search engine suits me fine. If I want to use Reddit then I go via Google, visit the page that has the information I need, and RUN.<p>I don&#x27;t want to spend any more time within the Reddit ecosystem than that. It&#x27;s a vicious miasma of hate and stupidity. Is there any community on the Internet more susceptible to propaganda than the front page of Reddit? They make boomers on Facebook look like James Randi in comparison.<p>At least Facebook and Twitter actually try and flag misinformation. Reddit actively promotes it, and it&#x27;s by design!
jaimex2over 3 years ago
That could have been an ema... comment.
webkikeover 3 years ago
Then ban the people gaming the system
nathiasover 3 years ago
reddit is good for customer reviews of nieche products, not much else
lupireover 3 years ago
Nice troll in the URL.
vaultover 3 years ago
URL: Reddit can<p>Title: Reddit can&#x27;t
lupireover 3 years ago
Nice troll in th
cc101over 3 years ago
The idea of reddit building competent software is hard to take seriously. I am appalled every time I try to buy an ad. Those folks have no idea what they are doing. Rank amateurs.
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polynomialover 3 years ago
tl;dr: • No one can build a better search engine, bc it will just get gamed to show bad results. • Google can&#x27;t built a better search engine bc they are beholden to ad rev (per Brin&#x2F;Page&#x27;s 1998 warning.)
asdfsfkwqeover 3 years ago
There is a Chinese counterpart&#x2F;copycat of Reddit --- Tieba. It is owned by Baidu (counterpart&#x2F;copycat of Google). More introduction can be found here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Baidu_Tieba" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Baidu_Tieba</a>.<p>Tieba was once popular just like Reddit. Then, the management (of Baidu) figured out how to make money with Tieba and its search engine to promote brand and erase negative comments. Not much people use it anymore.<p>The point in the article is pretty convincing to me.