The reddit results I see on Google or DDG are usually blocked so no browser can access them. I hate to see all that content disappear but on the other hand I really don't want to give Reddit any clicks.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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I am hoping (probably naively so) that lemmy's stock of technical answers will continue to grow and eventually become a half decent archive for people to search for potential solutions.
tbh I've never seen a Lemmy link when searching for stuff. Is it too small to show up? Or do search engines not index Lemmy instances?
You could always add "site:lemmy.world" to your search (remove the quotes). I commonly do that, as well as the same for reddit or stack overflow.
The problem with that is, lemmy.world is only one of many different instances. Too bad there isn't a way to add a modifier that searches the entire fediverse.
yea i've been doing "inurl:lemmy" for that reason
You'd miss instances that don't use "lemmy" in the URL, but it's at least a better solution than specifying a single instance.
out of the top of my head, that won't include lemm.ee, sopuli, beehaw, szmer.info, slrpnk.net, sh.itjust.works, or other threadiverse instances like kbin/mbin.
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A lot of Fediverse admins are just normal people like you and me with a budget, and disallowing bots and spiders helps save bandwidth, and the budget.
I was worrying about precisely this. I’d be ok with blocking search engines if there was a better way of searching but AFAICT there isn’t federated search of any kind?
Could it be possible to have one major global instance that aggregates everything so it can be indexed by search engines? Would that work? Or do I not fully understand how federation works?
That would defeat the purpose of federation.
It becomes a central choke point of moderation. Who gets to decide what instances are part of global and which ones aren’t. Because a free for all isn’t going to end well. And then you’re back at Reddit.
I wonder if you could have an instance federated to every other instance just for archived purposes, to save the data on every other instance's post and comment. Because copies of posts and comments are saved to federated instances, too, right? Or do I understand the tech wrong?
So it could have an admin team but no users, to prevent people worried about spammers and bots joining that instance to get around defederation rules. Maybe it just has a bot that crawls Lemmy, looking for instances to federate to. Could that work?
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Really? I thought they were free and didn’t affect bandwidth.
Any data transit costs money. Both in the data transit itself and in the increased server resources to respond to the web queries in the first place.
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Yep. I block all bots to my instance.
Most are parasitic (GPTBot, ImageSift bot, Yandex, etc) but I've even blocked Google's crawler (and its ActivityPub cralwer bot) since it now feeds their LLM models. Most of my content can be found anyway because instances it federated to don't block those, but the bandwidth and processing savings are what I'm in it for.
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I've seen it a couple of times when searching on DDG.
One of the major problems with Lemmy is that many posts get deleted and that nukes the comment section (which is where most of the answers will be).
I wish Lemmy deleted posts closer to how Reddit deletes posts - the post content should be deleted, but leave the comments alone.
Most of the originalish content on lemmy are linux related stuff, memes and porn. The latter 2 are mostly image/video based, so you don't search for that very frequently and easily. I can see that in the future it will become a very relevant source of info in linux admin and user circles.
I go back to r*ddit sometimes for some local content which is non existent on lemmy. I see that the tech related subs are mostly dead there, or at least only shadows of their former selfs. E.g. go to r/linux, sort by top all time. In the first 100 results you will barely find anything posted after the exodus.
Yeah I mostly go back for r/BestofRedditorUpdates to get my trash drama fix and r/nursing to commiserate with my people. I've tried bringing in more hcw communities but sometimes its tiring to be the first of a few to move over. It elicits some pretty strong feelings of isolation.
Yeah, the notion that Lemmy is a Reddit replacement is misguided. It definitely doesn't have the same Q&A balance Reddit does. It feels a lot more like 90s and early 2000s forums than the large-scale self-service link and customer service churn Reddit encourages.
Which I'm all for. I was never a Reddit guy and I do like it here. But in terms of how bad it is now that Reddit is not happy to host most of the actually useful online content for free... well, that's a different conversation.
I’m inclined to think due to the nature of the platform, contents are constantly duplicated to the eyes of search engines, which hurts authoritativeness of each instance thereby hurts ranking.
I've seen some when I appended "Lemmy" just like "Reddit". But it relies on lemmy being in the domain name.
Also I assume even when people click on those results, they don't get ranked much higher because it's so many different domains while reddit is just one.
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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.
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.
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Good. They can both die in a fire.
DDG is a metasearch engine uses Google as a primary search sources, so this would indicate Google is not returning search data to its own APIs.
I feared AI would lead to this, so hopefully I'm jumping to conclusions. DDG, searxng, kagi, and most other alternative search engines rely on this API.
Duckduckgo uses Bing for links.
from : https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
Good to know. I thought they used aggregated google too.
whoever is left there deserves whatever happens. they really showed what they thought of the users over the years. culminating in app/api control.
....and Pepperidge Farm definitely remembers saydra.
It is their internet peasants... Say thank you daddy let's you use it at all, shitlord.
Slaves are getting brazen now... Regime might get ideas about how to fix that from our greatest ally. They call it mowing the lawn. They are doing it it now! And regime likes it.
I don’t want reddit links showing up in my searches. I’m fine with this.
Weird, most of the results I get from Google's search are from Quora (and they fucking suck). Google as a search engine has been going downhill for a while now. Reddit has becomes an increasingly spammy shithole full of corporate and political astroturfing too.
Okay, hear me out, we should make a different service, like a network of computers where people can freely post information on some sort of page that other people can freely access without needing to log in to a million services. Maybe we could also add like little conversation boards to those to allow people to ask and answer questions, too.
Wild, I know, but I think there is some opportunity there.
The important part is not building it, but convincing the world, alas.
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Honestly the percentage of Reddit posts that Google returns which still actually retain their info is dropping substantially for me. Last few times it pulled up a Reddit post that should have my answer instead had either the question or the answers I needed deleted.
I'm not saying we should have gulags, but if we did, I have some suggestions for permanent residency.
Even back when I used Reddit, I had such a burning hate against Reddit results that I blacklisted them. So this is actually improving things for me, as I use DDG by default.
As such I hope that this decision becomes another nail in each of their (Google and Reddit's) coffins.
Not an ad, but Kagi is worth it. I'm ok with paying for search tho.
Yes an ad, and a free one at that.
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That’s fine. I don’t want Reddit results anyway.
Unfortunately (for me, I guess), appending 'reddit' is still the way to go for many queries...
The way the article is written you'll still get existing information, just not new posts.
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thats fucked
I'm still getting full reddit results on DDG.
Old indexed results are fine. But anything from last week is not showing up 
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