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Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal (www.404media.co)

submitted 4 months ago by hotpot8toe@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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DuckDuckGo, Bing, Mojeek, and other search engines are not returning full Reddit results any more.

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[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Highly doubtful.

The few times I have bothered to ask technical questions I mostly get one of the following:

Ideological ranting. "The problem is you aren't running arch linux in that corporate environment with proprietary hardware you need to interface with"
Complete refusal to read the question. "I totally didn't read that you said Foo was not viable for reasons XYZ but you should use Foo"
Complete nonsense

Reddit has a lot of that too but ALSO has the institutional knowledge of people who actually care enough to answer. Similar to stack overflow.

I try to help where I can but this is an enthusiast "site". So you have all the people who suggest all the crap they heard on linus tech tips rather than "Okay, for my day job we use X but no sane person should use that at home. Look into Y".

That said: I have said it before and I'll say it again. The age of the online message board for tech support is long gone. Because the super useful results might be talking about a bug from five years ago rather than a bug from today. The answer really is ephemeral discord servers.

[–] fuzzzerd@programming.dev 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ephemeral discord servers are awful because they don't scale and they can only ever help the lowest common denominator of questions/issues. We need something else, but it has yet to present itself as a solution.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm sure you've had bad experiences but they actually scale as well as any forum ever did and are great because the general vibe is not "This was asked ten years ago, go figure out some search terms" and more actually responding to and helping people.

The key is to have a moderated support channel.

[–] fuzzzerd@programming.dev 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's a never ending onslaught of beginner questions and experienced folks with domain knowledge burn out. I'm sure it's good when it's new and fresh and everyone is exited to participate, but that wears out. It's why things went away from mailing lists, or why mailing lists started getting archived, so they could be searched.

I guess with most things it comes in cycles, and we're at the on demand answers cycle right now.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That has not at all been my experience over the years.

Yes, the vast majority of questions are "beginner questions". Which... is true no matter where you go.

But when someone has the ability to articulate a "real" problem? Everyone comes out of the woodwork because that is actually interesting. And there is a very strong communal feeling of "we all have the same problem and are trying to collect data"

[–] ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 months ago

Usually when I try to get help with a "real" problem through discord, I get crickets