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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for kids growing up today in some ways. When I was younger the web was smaller and Google was newer and working better. For the most part if it existed on the internet I basically just had to put a couple words in a box and I'd get to it within a couple minutes and there wasn't that much to go through if I wasn't that accurate with my search terms.

Now whenever I use Google to find even the most simplest of things if it's not a local business that has a Google Maps result the results are terrible and I would have to go through too.

I watch our kids and their friends do all sorts of other things to find things. This is one of the reasons for the whole "just put reddit at the end of the search" comes from.

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It's upsetting and troubling how appending "reddit" to a search is your only hope of getting honest information, especially about products.

Everything else is ridden with SEO spam and faux reviews with referral links.

Does Reddit have any special controls to stop astroturfing or fake reviews?

Users and (at least before the last run through the meat grinder) moderators.

They have human moderators who by and large care about maintaining the quality of the communities they moderate, and give those moderators buttons to delete posts and ban users.

Although FWIW, reddit seems to have it's fair share of astroturfing (at least, in my own anecdotal experience), it's just comparatively less egregious than rawdogging the google results.

Sure they do, and the moderators, but it's getting worse.

Quite a few of the sub-reddits I liked went to shit over the summer when they made the API changes. The replacement mods aren't doing the same quality work as the original mods. What were nice sub-reddits previously are memified and gamified garbage now.

The fun part about that is that this method gives better results than searching on Reddit.

Also gives results at all. Reddit search doesn't even do comments.

> This is one of the reasons for the whole "just put ~ at the end of the search" comes from.

shushhhh!!!!! you're giving spammers ideas!!!!!

next thing we know, we'll have spammers creating fake subs with bots for this spam

too late for that

Google caused this situation itself. Sites that only wanted to get some clicks always existed. But the scale is due to the modern advertising industry which uses 20% of internet traffic just to serve mostly unwanted ads.

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