Is Google Dying? Or Did the Web Grow Up? | Hacker News Reader

Is Google Dying? Or Did the Web Grow Up?

theatlantic.com

38 pointscrosen9914 comments

Open articleView on HN

> “we resort to using Google, and appending the word ‘reddit’ to the end of our queries.”

Okay, how long until the SEO dungbeetles start abusing Reddit for their affiliate-link-laden content farms too?

i don't know specifically, but I agree it is inevitable. No idea what to do then.

searchterm site:reddit.com

I meant I don't know what to do after the SEO crud infests reddit and makes reddit worthless for searching.

you.com let's you select that preference once in their app store and then reddit (or other sites) show up anytime they're relevant: you.com/apps

I’ve seen this advice so much over the past month or 2 that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s being promoted by companies who have figured out how to effectively push their stuff on reddit. Or some contractor who runs Reddit campaigns or something.

They already are. At least so far, moderation on active subs and the low ranking of inactive / nothing but spam subs has kept this mostly in check.

A sad state if appending reddit leads to better results but it is true. For many terms you get news sites and you are not sure if the content was written by a bot or a human. Click farms certainly seem to have cracked the matrix of SEO.

I hope this is not because of the conquest against misinformation, Google heavily preferring "authoritative voices". If a term fits anything out of the news circle you get endless amount of articles of the same. They use different words but it is always the same content.

Although many people in their usage patterns are to blame too. If everyone forms a non-crawlable discord community, you should not complain about a lack of discoverability. IRC had the same problems but at least there were always alternatives with forums.

A button to filter any kind of media publication would really help.

In the past month I've stopped using discord entirely. I find myself feeling alarmed at the realization of not only what a black box it is, but at the effect it's having on the archiving, the retention of information and know-how.

It's not only easy to anticipate people looking back 20 years or so from now and saying "and then people moved to Discord, and we have no idea wtf happened after that" or even "dispite being connected through facebook and reddit, there seems to have been a general drop in shared knowlege for reasons unknown to us..."

This is a known problem, I'm not saying anything new but it's amazing (to me, at least) to see just how stark the problem is after having left discord...

I mean the service of discord is good, I use it too from time to time. But for building knowledge it is pretty bad. It is a black hole that sucks in all the content users have talked about. I see some startup developers exclusively using it and the numbers of their communities pretty much stagnate because they don't have a presence anywhere else. Reddit is also flawed but at least it can be indexed by crawlers. That offers a lot of advantages.

Joining a new channel is quite a lot of work since you jump into discussions without context. There is a lot of loss on the way. As I said, IRC had the same problems but the scope was a lot smaller since it was always flanked by forums and other platforms.

Within corporations with Slack and Teams there are similar effects. Yes, communication is effective but only on a very short term.

I have an archiving/notes/forum tool I’ve been working on to try to solve this, noticed this problem a long time ago. I’ve gone through a couple iterations I’ve just tested on myself, intend to release it for wider testing/feedback in the near future.

The goal is to make it as low friction as possible to share, link, and edit text snippets and raw files in a big graph. It’s similar to obsidian but I’m focusing more on mobile and creating something that allows for interrelated knowledge graphs.

> Google heavily preferring "authoritative voices"

Exactly this. I think google could improve overnight if it were to add a “everything or official sources” button. As the article implies a “discussions” button would also be immensely useful.

Web all grown up now? Ha-ha very funny.

Seriously, I personally find a mixture of using DuckDuckGo and Google search meets all my needs. Not a problem.

kagi search is best search.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com