As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.

I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.

Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s positively maddening. Especially since that Spez has turned Reddit into a walled garden experience now, I no longer want to rely on Reddit for answers. Google is just a mess of garbage blogs full of link rotted ‘answers’.

    • Burp@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      All the AI generated websites are driving me insane. They just repeat the same thing over and over again with a bunch of useless text.

    • Jamesbong@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I no longer used reddit daily. But I still use it (without an account) mainly for research. Reddit no longer exists. It’s just a databse of answers like stack overflow to me.

      Interestingly I even relay even less and less on searching reddit through google. I use bing ai and bardai since their dataset upadates daily.

      • folkrav@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t have access to Bard (Canada) and I don’t use Bing nor Edge, but ChatGPT is usually pretty good at telling me what to look for or giving me an answer that’s close to the real thing or has the right keywords. However, it’s really often just wrong enough that people replacing a search engine with it and use it for information is kind of worrying…

      • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, Duckduckgo, but I find accuracy a bit questionable. It’s not as predictive as Google. If you have suggestions though I’ll def try them.

        Apparently Bing is great for porn but I wouldn’t know.

            • localme@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Underrated comment.

              Fwiw, Amplosion is a great iOS app/safari extension to de-AMP google search results. Bonus: it’s made by Christian Selig, the dev behind Apollo (rip).

              • danielton@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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                1 year ago

                The other reason I quit using Google is because Google shows you what they think you want to see, rather than just what they found. I’m not really interested in buying an extension to make Google’s filter bubble usable.

        • dingus@lemmy.world
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          DuckDuckGo is shit. It doesn’t even understand basic syntax like quotes for some reason. I would rather have it only give me a few results to my query as opposed to showing me unrelated nonsense. Through the years I will occasionally try to give it a chance, but I can never find anything useful with it.

          Then everyone tells me “well, I just use DuckDuckGo to search Google using !g”. Well what the heck is the point of doing that? Now I have to type two extra characters to search the exact same search engine I was using anyway.

          • HughJanus@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Then everyone tells me “well, I just use DuckDuckGo to search Google using !g”. Well what the heck is the point of doing that?

            The point is to only use Google when DDG doesn’t give the results you want.

      • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        There is a new search engine https://trystract.com/ that is in Beta. It is interesting in that it’s open source and has a ‘Discussions’ feature that returns some Lemmy results. As it’s a Beta it’s pretty hit or miss right now.

  • Enigma@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    It will. I’ve asked stupid questions on here, that I could have gone to Reddit to find the answers for, just to help out with content.

    I still use Reddit for movie megathreads. There’s nowhere else on the internet that I’m able to do that yet. And I’d love to start megathreads here, but I’m not capable of handling such responsibility.

    • Dempf@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      I will try to do my part and ask some stupid questions as well. I have a whole lifetime of experience in being stupid so it shouldn’t be a problem.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      Yep I still search Reddit for answers, but I post content and ask questions here. Which is fine IMO, it’s has always been the people that make the good content, not the platform. There were good hardworking people that made those resources, and so it’s ok to use it till those resources move off site.

      One issue with Lemmy is the SEO problem. There are a few Lemmy search tools, but simply googling something doesn’t bring up posts like it would with Reddit. It either needs time, or someone will implement a fix in the source code.

  • mysoulishome@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ugh…I feel this. Recently have been struggling with tennis elbow and without Reddit all I would have had was shitty google web results…blogs, bullshit articles full of clickbait and ads with the same 5 tips. Including reddit I was able to figured out what the actual best information was…without the influence of big media bullshit.

    I did check mastodon and Lemmy…nothing really.

    The shitty thing is the biggest value reddit has at this point is the years of valuable information WE put into it. Facts and opinions ranked and critiqued and crowdsourced. Our best stories, photos, resources. Despite what people tell themselves, we don’t own any of it. It sucks.

  • fluckx@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I agree with the search engine lamenting. In the past I could just paste the terraform resource name in Google and the first hit would be the doc page. Now it doesn’t even deliver me with anything useful 90% of the time.

    Google search results really are turning/have turned to s***. Ive gotten better search results out of gpt4 than out of google. And all the “best x” or “best alternatives to y” are just clickbait sites nowadays…

    Ironically the web worked better without SEO I guess? Either that or all the content just became rubbish to lure people to add infested clickbait sites harvesting information and serving adds.

  • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
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    I hate how most search result options are either reddit, or some top 10 ranking website with no information, just repeated product information

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    I use a combination of kagi and ddg which is better for most things than Google. But, if I’m looking for “the best ____,” I still end up on Reddit. 90% of the review site are SEO bombs and/or AI generated nonsense.

    At least I’m not signed in anymore 🤷

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
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    I guess if GPT ate reddit, once it gets more reliable you can rely on that instead? Not sure if that’s much better though, lol

      • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Yes, every LLM ate reddit but LLMs aren’t aren’t reliable and tend to hallucinate .

        On the other hand, one could train an / (ask a big enough) AI to extract useful info from each post, sort it in big categories (life style, science, mechanic,etc ) and subcategories (life tips, male clothe tips, chemistry, animal facts , car engine repair, bike engine repair ) then Do an internet search to check if there are other sources and use it to judge the reliability of the info and put it in a database that the LLM look up before answering. This condensed reddit could likely hold on a few gigs. Maybe there’s a better way to do it but this is the extent of my very limited knowledge.

          • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            Bing does extract info from sites, including reddit and compare it to other sources but i doubt they’re creating a database. Imagine all the wisdom, knowledge of hundreds of thousands of people but offline and only without the useless arguing and other bullshit.

  • hpucks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t participate in the conversation at Reddit anymore (deleted my account), but if I’m searching for something I still do the old Reddit Google trick. There’s still a wealth of info there.

  • Bartem@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    But how can we accomplish the same with lemmy?

    We can’t add Lemmy.com to the google search, and I can’t remember all the lemmy community names either.

        • The Giant Korean@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          Lol, totally cool. Maybe one day in the future, when Lemmy is full of content, someone will do a search for sesame substitutes and find this post.

          And thanks! I really like the flavor and texture tahini imparts. I’m actually allergic to peanuts, but another nut butter might work out for me.

            • The Giant Korean@lemmy.worldOP
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              1 year ago

              Haha no worries! I am allergic to a lot of foods, and there’s no way you could have known. I’m actually also allergic to chickpeas, too 😂 so I make hummus out of white beans and/or fava beans. Tastes very good.

              I was originally curious because I thought it might be fun to start a supper club for people with food allergies. Sesame allergies are very common.

  • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Do we have a similar way of searching lemmy? Since we all have different addresses, I don’t think the same site: would work.

  • Bz2486@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Makes sense. What reddit has turned into for me now, is the internets best encyclopedia. And theres no escaping the vast amount of information saved on there, or any chance of finding it elsewhere. Yet

  • suchwin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Haven’t seen it mentioned yet, so I’ll add that you can narrow down your search a little with a site qualifier. So you can search “diy table instructions site:reddit.com” to specifically limit results to reddit only (or any site). I’ve personally also found a lot of use by using the same method within a subreddit, “diy table instructions site:reddit.com/r/woodworking”

    There’s a lot of good tips at this link. Although it’s an old page, so I dunno if they all work still, ymmv. https://www.ou.edu/webhelp/general/tutorials/google/

    I agree with some other posters that hopefully lemmy can grow to fill the boots that reddit is stumbling out of. Although with so many different instances, with different url’s, it seems less straight forward.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      I think search engines are going to need a way to understand the fediverse in a deeper way than just the URLs. I don’t know what it would look like exactly, but at least provide some context for the network that this link belongs to.

      One method I was considering would be for a search engine to run an instance of each fediverse protocol and index the fediverse that way.

      Then the result would take you via the search engine’s instance, and from there you could navigate to the native instance or your home instance using the ! links or whatever. Maybe the search results could offer you multiple links for however you wanted to access it, but the search instance would allow the fediverse links to appear in a common unified way. If you were searching via duckduckgo you’d go to the lemmy.duckduckgo.com domain.

      Incidentally if an instance wanted to opt out of search results it’d be as simple as defederating from the search instance.