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Google Execs Admit Users Are 'Not Quite Happy' With Search Experience After Reddit Blackouts (cnbc.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
Google users who add "Reddit" to searches for specific topics found this ineffective when numerous Reddit forums went dark this month. This happened as many popular forum moderators turned pages private to protest Reddit's decision to charge developers for data access, resulting in inaccessible or unhelpful search results. The incident, CNBC reports, has prompted Google to search for a better fix. An anonymous reader shares a report: It's an issue that Google executives say is at least partially resolved by a new feature called Perspectives that was unveiled on Monday. The Perspectives tab, available now on mobile web and the Google app in the U.S., promises to surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.

At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add "Reddit" to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience. "Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that's iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy," Raghavan said. "We need to make users happy."
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Google Execs Admit Users Are 'Not Quite Happy' With Search Experience After Reddit Blackouts More

Google Execs Admit Users Are 'Not Quite Happy' With Search Experience After Reddit Blackouts

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  • Pinterest (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:23AM (#63636802) Journal

    I wish we could permanently filter unhelpful resources without having to add "-site:" to every search.

    • Pinterest (Score:4, Funny)

      by byronivs ( 1626319 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:29AM (#63636826) Journal
      Where images go to to be forever kept unseen except in a hopeful yet ultimately dashing image search.

    • Re:Pinterest (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NobleNobbler ( 9626406 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:30AM (#63636832)

      Once you filter out every fake SOE optimized might-as-well-be autogenerated "blog", google has nothing left to show. Has google innovated in any way with search or has it just let it fall into disrepair?

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:33AM (#63636844)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Right now there is a paid search engine called Kagi (I am not an ad I swear) and a number of people have said good things about it but it’s 20 dollars when I think maybe I need less internet in general.

          These Google execs through. By their statement its like they didn’t get a message that everyone agrees Google blows. How could they not possibly know?

        • I'm fairly convinced that if a PageRank, all-words-matter, search engine that was released tomorrow, it would end up being 100 times as effective as Google today. Yes, PageRank could be gamed, but as we've learned, whatever the hell Google does today can be gamed too. And PageRank was at least based upon links from trustworthy websites.

          I'm not sure it would be that easy.

          When your company (legit or not) depends on getting Google hits you spend a LOT of resources on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Whatever Google does it's going to get exploited.

          I suspect there's room for some special purpose search engines, for instance, if I'm programming I probably don't care about results outside of Medium, Stack.*, and a handful of other forums. You could go a long way making special purpose search engines with a big white list of sites.

          Whether that

      • Is there anything to show? Google should be funding reddit

    • Re:Pinterest (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:09AM (#63636946)

      I was looking into Kagi search a few weeks ago and one of the features it lists is exactly that: the ability to block or boost domains in your search results [kagi.com]. They're a paid service, but between their adoption of DuckDuckGo's "bang" operators (e.g. add "!w" to instantly search Wikipedia, and likewise !rt for Rotten Tomatoes, !a for Amazon, !yt for YouTube, !imdb for...you get the idea, and hundreds or thousands more of those), a business model that aligns their incentives with my own, their frankly "low tech" results that abide by KISS, and some nice-to-have features like the one you mentioned, I've been meaning to swing back around to give some consideration as to whether I might want to use them instead of DDG.

      • DDG (Score:1)

        by p51d007 ( 656414 )
        I just use DDG....99.9% of the time I find what I want. Shoot, if I can't find it on DDG, I probably don't need to find it anyway. LOL

      • I just use Firefox's quicksearch bookmarks (es: https://www-archive.mozilla.or... [mozilla.org] ). Mind you, this assumes the target site has its own search function, so it might not cover all functions of an external indexing engine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by c-A-d ( 77980 )

        I've been meaning to try kagi for a couple of months. It lets you do one important thing: block domains from search results in a custom list. Pinterest is first on the chopping block for me.

    • There's Personal Block List https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org] , also Unpinterested! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org] for that particular domain. (If you're not using Firefox there's nothing I can do for you.)

    • I wish we could permanently filter unhelpful resources without having to add "-site:" to every search.

      I seem to recall, way back in the day (e.g. well over a decade ago), being able to do exactly that. Was that a different search engine that I'm mis-attributing to Google?

    • Something similar exists as a plugin: https://iorate.github.io/ublac... [github.io]

      I use it to block the N-thousand Stack Overflow SEO leeches, the useless programming "tutorial" sites, etc.

      *://www.kite.com/*
      *://www.educba.com/*
      *://intellipaat.com/*
      *://www.programiz.com/*
      *://githubmemory.com/*
      *://opendev.org/*
      *://stackshare.io/*
      *://www.saashub.com/*
      *://www.slant.co/*
      *://newbedev.com/*
      *://www.buzzphp.com/*
      *://www.proxynetworks.com/*
      *://www.generacodice.com/*
      *://www.codegrepper.com/*
      *://www.py4u.net/*
      *://pretagteam.com/*

    • back in the day when search returned what you asked for instead of what it thinks you asked for with fuzzy context, google also allowed you to blacklist domains from ever showing in the results. it was nice. like. rip expertsexchange.
  • Wow, they've reinvented Google (web) Cache!

  • A bold new direction from Google (Score:5, Funny)

    by almitydave ( 2452422 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:46AM (#63636878)

    "We need to make users happy."

    I, for one, am enthused to hear about Google's bold new corporate strategy. These are really untested waters for their user experience engineers.

  • Google Search (Score:5, Informative)

    by rlwinm ( 6158720 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:46AM (#63636880)
    Google Search has been useless for close to a decade now. I remember when Google blew away what others (like Altavista and Yahoo) were doing. It read my mind. These days Google search is useless. The results aren't even in the same area of what I'm looking for anymore. I do searches for very specific technical subjects so you can't even blame this on SEO poisoning. In fact when I put very specific technical terms in double quotes -- I don't get useful results.

    Google's search is in a kind of "New Coke" situation. Consumers hate it and are baffled as to why the old recipe can't be brought forward.
    • I'd have to agree with this. I remember a google of the past where you could put in the part number of an electronic part and have the parts data sheet usually directly from the manufacturers site within the top few search results. Now a days good luck if you do get a result somewhere in the 1st 3 pages it's one of those sites that hoovers up data sheets from all over the web and makes you click though a bunch of BS to finally get to the datasheet if its not a flat out paywall site.

      • Same here, even when I was looking to buy that specific part, I got links to a bunch of other random parts from the same manufacturer.

    • It’s crazy that I used to type shit like “the movie with the square hat and a hole in the front” and “the time mchammer showed everyone his dick”.

      (These are totally made up and not real btw)

      and google would find what I was looking for even when I was getting mchammer and vanilla ice mixed up. It was practically psychic.

      Now as soon as I put in MChammer there’ll be the past 3 things put out by his publicist, a link to his latest cd on amazon, and his wikipedia arti

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        Try yandex. Seems the Russians are either less capable at, or less interested in, "total information warfare" centered around bolstering consumerism and ad revenue.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
        If I had to guess I'd say Google is now ranking things more on popularity than content. Which is useless for me as what I search for is pretty obscure most of the time.

        • We’re basically back to a curated list like Yahoo except it’s machine generated and it has a search-like interface.

  • This happened as many popular forum moderators turned pages private to protest Reddit's decision to charge developers for data access, resulting in inaccessible or unhelpful search results.

    Really? Is Reddit now taking business genius advice from business genius Elon Musk [wikipedia.org]?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      This happened as many popular forum moderators turned pages private to protest Reddit's decision to charge developers for data access, resulting in inaccessible or unhelpful search results.

      Really? Is Reddit now taking business genius advice from business genius Elon Musk?

      I believe it has been noted that the CEO of Reddit admired what Elon Musk was doing to Twitter in "making it better" and wanted to follow it.

      So basically... yes?

      • Wow. It's one thing to be on a sinking ship. It's on a whole other level to be envious of being on a sinking ship.

  • People add 'reddit' hoping for authenticity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:51AM (#63636898)

    The hope in adding "reddit" to a search is that they'd get a discussion from end-users instead of some marketing blog or otherwise public relations material promoting a product.
    So, in other words, using "reddit" to defeat the intended purpose of google, which is to present search-engine-optimized marketing material and paid ads.

    • People adding 'reddit' are doing it wrong, it used to be adding 'forum' used to get you actual discussions. Although now even that only hits on a few useful places. There is no where to go just for useful results because there is just so much noise now, and most of that noise is on purpose to draw in hits to someone's advertisement revenue.

  • "Admits" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cinder6 ( 894572 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @10:51AM (#63636900)

    Why do so many articles and headlines color their reporting with this loaded word?

    Did Google ever deny this fact?
    Did Google try to keep silent on it?
    Is this some sort of reversal in Google's stance?

    Just use "states". "Admits" implies some sort of wrongdoing or at least reluctance, and I doubt either is happening here. Countless reddit results went dark—of course this will annoy users! And it's not like Google has anything to hide here—reddit isn't their company, and Google isn't responsible for spez being a habitual liar to the point that users revolted.

    • Somewhere in the last decade, everything became partisan and personal. If you don't agree with me about whatever issue am talking about, you're a racist, or a wokie, or whatever my favorite insult of the day is.
      This is just an extension of that, with "Journalists" not giving you the facts, but the "facts" that they know you have to believe and side with. After all, they're right and you're a racist/snowflake if you disagree.

    • It is a kind of reversal since Google removed the Discussion search 10 years ago leading to the ridiculous situation where the "reddit" keyword became important to the functionality of Google search.
    • This is a pet peeve of mine. In journalism school, we learned to use "says" or "acknowledges" in these contexts because, as you pointed out, words such as "admits" carry inaporpriate negative connotations. That said, I graduated in 2012, before the entire industry gave in to SEO and clickbait, so who knows what they're teaching today.
      • This is a totally uninformed assumption, but it *feels* like most people writing articles now never went to school for journalism.
  • for general searches. Search on any topic and you get 3-5 paid advertisements followed by 2 pages of SEO spam with worthless computer generated garbage. So it's no surprise that Google has been leaning heavily on reddit and a handful of other specialty forums, basically funcitoning as a search engine not for the Internet but for those sites.

    I don't think it matters. The forums have mostly given up. They're either reopening BAU or they're no longer spammed with pictures of sexy John Oliver. Reddit's won.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Solution (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @11:56AM (#63637122)

    Add "-site reddit.com" to your search query.

    • Part of the issue is that without reddit, it is harder to find niche information rather than SEO spam.

      • In my experience, most of the Reddit results are part of the SEO spam.

      • I was trying to help my son tonight figure out an audio problem with his streaming setup. So many Reddit links that I just ignored in the search results, it would have been much easier to go to Reddit. I added Reddit to my PiHole block lists to keep me from accidentally clicking a link to give them a view.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hazem ( 472289 )

      The problem isn't that you can't get google to find results on Reddit. The problem is that many subreddits have gone dark and lots of users have deleted their posts.

      So when you search for how to get some piece of software to work on some piece of hardware and put "reddit" in the search, you get the page on reddit where that content used to be but it's either been deleted or replaced with text about the protest.

  • You don't have to specify Reddit (Score:3)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @12:17PM (#63637206) Journal

    You don't have to specify "reddit" in your search to see reddit results. Most definitely not. I've had at least half a dozen results over the last couple weeks that I tried to pull up but the subreddit was private. I have fallen back on Google's cache and been able to find what I needed there. I never included "reddit" in any of those searches.

  • After Reddit Blackouts? (Score:3)

    by endus ( 698588 ) on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @12:37PM (#63637278)

    Google has quietly become a fairly bad search engine and it has nothing to do with reddit. The amount of spam in the results is ridiculous. You can't even narrow a search anymore...you just get the same spam pages with the additional term tacked on to the same content.

    • Google search is not good now, but is that really the fault of Google or just greedy people putting up spam websites to fill the search results so that their advertisement/tracking/data collection website gets hits?

      We blame google for being bad at search, but how good can anyone be at search if society uses the internet as their toilet? Internet gives everyone a voice which is great - but it also gives the faceless assholes someplace to flourish.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Indeed. Google "wins" the title of "the" search engine and thus every internet marketing concern in the world throws huge amount of resources into ruining the results for their own gain.

        It's an unenviable position.

      • It's the fault of both. Yes, greedy people throw up spam to get hits. But Google used to be very good about filtering out the spam, back when organic search results were front-and-center and advertising was relegated to a column down the right-hand side (and populated primarily based on the search keywords). The more Google has gotten directly involved in advertising, the worse their spam filtering has gotten. Which shouldn't surprise anyone since the spammers are the ones most willing to pay premium prices

  • I see AI as killing the usefulness of forums like reddit and the rest.

    Right now people search forums because they are looking for information from real people. Once AI starts polluting that knowledgebase, you won't know if you're really hearing someone giving advice, or if it's just an AI generated advertisement or just AI generated misleading garbage.

    • The sad part is that right now it is still somewhat easy to separate garbage from actual sources of information. But AI can put out a bit of text that is totally reasonable and well-argued... and wrong.

  • If they actually cared, they'd allow user search preferences. Imagine being able to permanently add "-site:pinterest.com, -site:quora.com, -site:experts-exchange" to your search preferences without relying on a third party extension.

  • Google on ‘groomer site:reddit.com’ and then google on Google on ‘groomer’. Notice the difference

  • Even when users don't specifically ask for Reddit, many of my top results seem to include Reddit links. For at least the last few months.

    And I don't search often on mobile, so this won't help me. I think the idea of users filtering by source type is interesting, but why stop there?

    Most companies suffer from previous success, and Google is no different. If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like... Everything looks like searching or advertising to Google. That's the lens they perceive throu

  • Google has turned positively evil.
  • Sometimes I almost wish for AI to improve search result response times. But only almost.

  • Quora permanent blackout when?

  • when the internet is getting more and more consolidated, you just go to the site its consolidated on and search. Wikipedia and reddit for knowledge. Facebook youtube and ticktock for mindless faff Porn hub etc for Faffing. The search engine for most people is where they type "Facebook"

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