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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

reddit is essential to google, adding it as a keyword in searches increases google's value by billions

Shhh don't tell anyone, the advertisers will start trying to defeat this.

But seriously, I don't understand how Google has let their results become such trash. If you actually want community sentiment (what's generally accepted as the least shitty X you can buy) you have to dig through reddit results. If you don't it's AI generated blogspam for days

It's pretty sad actually. Especially if I'm trying to look up anything that might be related to a buying decision. What's fun is reddit's search feature is kinda garbage so they really need each other.

I’ve been unimpressed by google, but the feature that’s finally catalyzed me to explore other search engines is the way they now take up precious mobile browser screen space when one searches with a frozen pane of the search. Terrible ui decision.

If it weren't for reddit google would be damn near useless to me.

This isn't even a joke, it's just true. "reddit [my actual search]" is the only way I know to sort of get at all kinds of info that Google is no longer any good whatsoever at finding. I guess if that stops being useful, for some reason, I'll have to resort to one of those long queries that tries to limit searches to independent forums (which used to be visible without that kind of thing, when they were relevant, but are now nearly impossible to find otherwise). Twitter might be a partial replacement, but they seem dedicated to making searching their site, by any means, as useless as possible.

I've had good luck on finding results in forums just by adding the word "forum" to the search. Not every result will be a forum but some should pop up

Switched browsers, ended up using bing for a while... It was even worse. SEO has destroyed the Internet, it's pretty hard to find anything relevant anymore... Outside a very few sites like Reddit, Stack Overflow and Wikipedia. And each of those has it own host of issue. Somethings kinda still work like technical information. Now to think might it be that some engineers at Google actually try to keep that section somewhat usable?

I yearn for a curated search engine that only looks at a small section of the internet and completely omits notorious SEO abusing sites. Most of the time, I am not trying to search through the corpus of human knowledge (google's old goal), but rather, to perform a very specific kind of search in a specific problem domain.

I'm working on something like this for code search (https://ask.moe/search/code), which currently consist of about 150 sites that I will continue to expand whenever I discover a useful site missing (e.g. official website of some package that contain good documentation).

I decided to start with code because it's something I personally use every day, and I got fed up with the spammy sites that just present an answer (or often only the question itself) extracted from StackOverflow, but plan to do something similar with other categories in the future. I'm curious to hear how you'd approach this problem, as in which categories you'd support and how you'd break it down?

I'm going to bookmark this and check it out.

I've got a suggestion, I queried "C# ?." and my results were mostly generic about C# documentation. I wanted to get more information about how to use the null conditional operator.

I suspect the query is ignoring the '?.' because it thinks of it as unimportant symbols. Would it be possible to modify the search engine to treat punctuation as operators, or terms in-and-of-themselves?

Thanks, I'm afraid there's little I can do as it's just using Google Custom Search Engine with whitelisted dev sites, but it should work if you type out the meaning of the symbols, e.g. "C# null conditional" instead of "C# ?." (or "C# question mark dot" to figure out what the symbols mean).

And it's unfortunate if you have the Reddit app installed and try doing this, because every link is going to jump you to the app, and you have to switch back to the browser to do another search.

I'm not the only one.

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