Discussions: Real human answers in search results | Hacker News Reader

Discussions: Real human answers in search results

brave.com

100 pointsvmullin52 comments

The content of Reddit discussions on relative merit are terrible. Usually a bunch of groups are repeating long-held misconceptions that may have been true at some point but are no longer true, and get upvoted by people that recognize the same out-of-date facts.

I'm not saying the web-at-large is _much_ better, but curated content from true experts _tends_ to be a lot better (finding those experts is obviously hard). Throwing more algorithmic crap on the results page doesn't make results better. It just adds more noise.

The given example on the blog post points to this page [1] where the top comments/top replies are:

- "I know OLEDs are better, but you should at least show 2 pictures from the same angle." "The room lighting is completely different as well. I don't understand the motivation here. Bit of a weird post"

- "You ah ..... You see that location more times than you care to admit ?" "Yeah but now when he sees it, it has the deepest blacks"

- "I absolutely think OLED is way better than LCD, too. Just your comparison is not good. [...]" "I totally agree, it was a spur-of-the-moment comparison as I saw the awful backlight bleed and the shimmering on the image I put on top there [...]"

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/safq43/the_dif...

In fields where I have expertise, the Reddit discussions I've seen are worse than nothing - the wrong answers to the wrong questions. I find them a waste of time, with very rare exceptions.

Perhaps I'm painting with too broad a brush, and some subreddits are valuable?

> curated content from true experts _tends_ to be a lot better (finding those experts is obviously hard)

Yes! I would love a search engine that is limited to high-quality sources. Technically it seems simple: Just limit indexing to expert/professional/high-quality domains. If I look up something in the field of science, show me results from Nature, the NY Times science section, AAAS, conferences, Scientific American, etc.

Some valuable content would inevitably be omitted, but we live in an age of information overload - I would much rather omit a few things than deal with the 99% low quality info.

You can already accomplish this by defining relevant sites in your query.

Maintain a few lists of sources you deem authorities in various disciplines, and voila…

While I agree the current state of search is pretty brutal, it’s still a slight improvement over the limitations of a physical library or encyclopedia.

That said, IMHO it’s unreasonable to expect any ‘search engine’ to be able to capture the intent of your brief query string, survey the current authorities (simply determining said authorities is contentious enough), and return the type of results you’re describing - in countless languages and across infinite disciplines, no less

Don't you know where are the experts... if you know where they are you only need to customize your search in Google to get the best results. Don't be so lazy, human intelligence is far more discerning that any available AI at the moment, most everything that champs AI or Machine Learning is neither anyways.

>Yes! I would love a search engine that is limited to high-quality sources.

I'm pretty certain Google ranks pages higher if they are viewed as authorities.

Also, I think quroa does this

They don't weigh it nearly heavily enough IME. Most of the search results are useless.

Yes

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

Yep, you should also be careful of people shilling (not even corporate brands doing marketing but regular people who are shareholders in a stock shilling!). For example /r/buildapc famously has a bias towards AMD CPU/GPU because many posters there are $AMD holders. Same goes for Tesla across pretty much all subreddits.

That is simply nonsense. You like NVIDIA that is fine... some other people value bang for the buck and go for AMD knowing the limitations fine. But just thinking that people are doing a concerted effort to try to pump a stock in a specialized group about building a PC is just simply insane... You better have it looked by a specialist, you may have a real problem.

I have the same experience.

Usually, I find Reddit discussions at least 5 orders of magnitude less valuable than HN ones, for example.

They're not useless, but HN most often contain good advice. It has bad advice too, but it's easier to sort out.

I find myself attaching "reddit" to the end of search queries more and more so this is a great feature. Even though the discussions aren't always perfect its nice to see opinions that aren't manufactured to maximize clout, SEO, or ad revenue like most of the internet is.

Every time I find a promising search result from reddit on a niche topic, it turns out I wrote it like 5 years ago. And the answers are unsatisfactory.

Just too niche and search engines got too bad, and more of the conversational internet went behind walled gardens.

The first rule of using Reddit for research, is that you don't tell anyone you are using Reddit for research.

Implementing a feature like this will turn Reddit into an astroturfed, SEO hell. There are already articles of people spending a few hundred bucks to make BS go viral on that site.

This can happen more invisibility then an old-school forum (glad Brave is including those BTW), since this unnatural behavior can be easily identified, because of the smaller community, and site that isn't based around upvotes.

It's already gamed to death.

I live in India and I've found astroturfed products on reddit (It's not popular here).

A while ago, I was looking at pet transportation companies. I came across many innocent looking threads asking for the same which had recommendations for companies.

Nothing suspicious except username which had a pattern. I searched for the pattern and found few more similar username doing same recommendation under similar thread.

In the end, all of it were accounts by the company or market firm hired by them.

Similar experience. I was looking up standing desks. Any subreddit related to standing desks were saturated by businesses and their social media reps. While I appreciate that they were upfront, it is getting even harder to get an honest, real person review of various consumer products and services.

I'm convinced it's basically impossible to get good reviews for items such as standing desks. I eventually just bought one and felt like it was pure luck that it didn't suck. I did find some good reviews on the relative merits of standing desks vs. alternatives though.

Good thing no one who works at Reddit is lurking here.

ooh this is really good, granted I'm biased because I am already a Brave user

Also its not just reddit they are integrated with, if I search 'best catfishing austin' I see they've pulled our local fishing discussion board thats like an old school php forum and a great resource.

That forum is nowhere on the front page of google for this search , instead there are lots of made for SEO 'magazines' there

Wow I'm impressed to see smaller forums like that show up, nice.

Google used to have this. It showed search results from all kinds of different forums. Remember vbulletin and phpbb? It was a really useful feature and I don’t know why Google removed it.

I guess the equivalent search function in 2022 would search reddit, fb groups and discord.

I don't remember using that feature but just like I add reddit today, I used to add vbulletin.

Brave should work with Facebook to unlock a massive amount of this content.

Facebook will not work with Google for competitive reasons, and for similar reasons, it would make sense for them to build up a search competitor like Brave.

My own personal experience is that Facebook Groups have some of the best content on the internet for a number of hobbies. For example, if you want to know how to grow tea, or create a new workout targeting triceps, or build a shed in your backyard -- great answers for these types of questions are hidden away from search in Facebook Groups.

I agree. This is an unpopular opinion but Facebook is gating a significant part of the internet from search engines. Hopefully now that their growth is slowing they might have to unblock it.

As skeptical as I have been about their crypto stuff, Brave has been making genuinely new features for several iterations now.

>> For now Brave Search Discussions come primarily from two sources: Reddit and StackExchange. Brave will be adding more sources for Discussions in the near future.

Actually there are other sources already, I searched 'gemini protocol' and HN is there.

How concerned should we be that this only works because currently SEO has no incentive to target Reddit or StackOverflow, and if this takes off, those communities will be overrun by SEO spam?

It is exactly that. I'm not sure what the norms are on linking vs copying own posts here, so for now I'm going with both.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369746

Marketer perspective: you can not build a communication tool you find useful that won't end up being used to make money. It will get figured out. I could go into a bit more philosophical angle with reterritorialization done by capital, but I think it's much simpler to consider the following: between politics (where once any 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's niche interest, it becomes valuable) there just isn't anything left. Go ahead, try to find something.

Reddit is being constantly targeted. I still use it, because what else?, but if the method isn't obvious, here's what you do: you are hired by/own small company making niche potato chips dip sold via Amazon. You go to google keywords and check 'potato chips dip', 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).

That's it, it's easy. What Reddit (and any mildly aware SM company) does, is they try to offer marketers access to audience for a price that'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's the general gist. If you can imagine using similar method to get in front of your eyes when you're looking for something, then it would just be quite weird if nobody ever did it.

Kind of sideways related to "Goodhart's law" -- "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Which kind of dooms all web search now that one thinks about it.

The types of questions (software recommendations etc) that spammers would answer tend to be off topic in StackOverflow. And off-topic answers tend to get flagged and down voted very quickly.

how would that work? the point of the SEO spam is to fill up a site with 'content' and then sell ads or affiliate links to make money on that site

You can't really make money by commenting on Reddit, they are very agressive about affiliate links and banning

Yeah, I'm not sure it would work the same as current SEO spam, but I just feel like some portion of this idea is predicated on mis-aligning incentives. Right now, SEO has no incentive to go after Reddit comments, so Reddit comments are (apparently) higher quality than raw search results. But once search engines start directing people to Reddit comments, the SEO's incentives shift, and it feels like their behavior would change accordingly (although I admit I can't articulate a clear vision of what that new behavior would be), causing the reliability of Reddit comments to plummet.

Maybe it's true that Reddit's moderation is sufficient to prevent this from happening, but I feel like I see a decent amount of SEO-adjacent subreddits already, for things like new crypto pump-and-dumps. Before Reddit removed nsfw subs from r/all, you'd sometimes see a bunch of spam links for OnlyFans sites.

I could imagine a situation where Brave has to try to distinguish good subreddits from bad subreddits and it becomes just as challenging as distinguishing good websites from bad websites.

It looks like these days, NLP models are able to “seem” human. Start generating many reddit accounts, act like humans, gain karma. When an important discussion appears, use the army of bots to debate that product A is better than product B

EDIT: If previously the race was to make a business look legitimate (page rank), then now it is about making users look legitimate (human rank)

Shilling and shameless plugs.

Forums hve been dying for a decade so I’m not sure what other discussion sources they can add, aside from maybe Quora and maybe Twitter.

HN?

I'm sure there are many 'HN-like' forums for many other topics.

Hn is not forum

Forums have way deeper discussions meanwhile hn's approach is wider

If HN is not that, I don't know what it is:

Definition of forum: [1]

(...)

b: a public meeting place for open discussion

c: a medium (such as a newspaper or online service) of open discussion or expression of ideas

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forum

News aggregator with comment section.

Real forums operate in different way which pushes discussions in a different way

Your definition is so general that majority of things could be considered as a forum, yet it aint, thus this definition is not so useful

The biggest difference is that once something drops from front page on hn, then discussio s is dead unlike on forums where you can send thread to the top

Anyone know of any?

I hope Reddit has a good anti-bot system in place.

Brace for SEO spammers, they're coming to your subreddit.

> Brace for SEO spammers, they're coming to your subreddit.

Or those million complete waste of time MVP vote whores who just paste the "Reset PRAM" or other irrelevant standard block pasts to every question on the google support groups.

Yes, if anything is worse than Reddit it’s the official forums of the large tech companies.

It does. Human moderators!

Even if you're joking, the problem with reddit SEO bots is that the bots can just post to subreddits which their owners are moderators of.

I think search should be split into two categories, one is seeking advice from other humans, another is pinpoint exact doc retrieval without the fuzzing or auto-correction bullshit

What ever, you are always better customizing your search with Google Search... Google is still the king of search, but you have to know how to utilize it. Forget about any other search engine. It baffles me that HN a community of nerds still doesn't know how to use Google Search. Kept it coming.

Wow, that's amazing! I agree so much. When I want to know which of two products is better, I just want to see a casual reddit discussion with real people stating their opinions and knowledge. Discussions seems like a great feature! Brave Search is becoming more and more interesting.

Good for brave for upping it's outreach with DDG's recent debacle.

Discussion boards should largely be containerized into niches/domains. Generalized QnA forums with central moderated are bad design. Case in point - Quora. Quora is essentially what not to do when you want to build a discussion board. Quora's moderation services suck and it's automated spam filters has failed adapt to the "Value first, pitch last" posts.

I wonder why Brave Search doesn't have an option to disable the suggestion feature.

In the Discussions box, click ... --> Disable this feature.

What I want is a search engine which searches the complete content of every paper, including both original research reports and reviews, published in a peer-reviewed journal since 1900. No, not just abstracts.

Of course we can't have that since it's all hidden behind proprietary paywalls, and so much for the promise that the Internet would be the greatest source of information for all and would open up the knowledge base for every human being on the planet.

That's the scientific knowledge base, and it's absolutely ridiculous that people anywhere can't search through it easily in today's world.

Like google scholar?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...

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