Reddit, Quora, and other internet forums that have climbed up through the traditional set of Google links. Data analysis from Semrush, which predicts traffic based on search ranking, shows that traffic to Reddit has climbed at an impressive clip since August 2023. Semrush estimated that Reddit had over 132 million visitors in August 2023. At the time of publishing, it was projected to have over 346 million visitors in April 2024.

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Making it extremely hard to actually find professional content because Reddit tends to cater to the lowest common denominator and most professional subs tend to corrupt over time.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        to be fair most of the “professional” sites are just spam now. thats when it isnt entirely written by ai.

    • GreenSofaBed@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      I was googling gen ai transformers yesterday and most of the results were just heavily SEOd websites, where the first few paragraphs are just repeats of as many related keywords as possible to get high up in Google. Then the actual content I was looking for was usually garbage.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The most professional content I’ve seen lately is things like a spaghetti recipe that explains the history of spaghetti, and my kids don’t normally like spaghetti but they took seconds of this one because it’s so good!

      Now, let’s talk about your choices in water here. You could go to a nearby spring and collect your own, but I find storebought water is just fine. You want to boil that water, which works best under high heat unless you want to wait forever!

    • MysticKetchup@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Google has been killing those off for a while. Nowadays it’s hard to find anything that isn’t just the copy-pasted SEO bait non-articles covered in ads

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      How can I find those more professional sites? I’d need some, as it’s sometimes hard to find info on OS API, as “it’s bad practice to not use Johnny’s Janky and Bloated Everything Library (JJBEL), that still handles XInput controllers through the DirectInput API, but it also has other extras”. I’ve had issues with RawInput under Windows (with that, in theory, I can use Xbox One/Series controllers to their fullest potential), and all I get is either SEO-ridden advertisements for existing libraries (which wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t have massive problems), or tutorials for said libraries. Since I’m working with D, I have to interface to C calls, which wouldn’t be a problem if they were documented properly and in an accessible way.

      My own D native and less bloated SDL replacement’s (iota) development got halted for getting null for device pointers no matter what, and with no proper instructions on how to resolve it.

  • nomad@infosec.pub
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    7 months ago

    I’m surprised nobody mentioned the AI training data deal that Google and reddit have. Google has every incentive to boost reddit rating to get more high quality training data.

    • 0nekoneko7@lemmy.worldOP
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      7 months ago

      What high-quality training data? more like people’s garbage opinions and kinks on Reddit.

      • nomad@infosec.pub
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        7 months ago

        To be fair, it’s less about quality and more about quantity when training LLM.

      • foggy@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I mean, you just got me kinda excited that there might be a decently good AI sex chat in the near future. That thing will churn out interactive Literotica like it’s no one’s business.

        • Hubi@feddit.de
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          7 months ago

          Do you really want to chat about that with the distilled essence of a million redditors?

          • foggy@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Their essence? No.

            The essence of the breadth and depth of their depraved fantasies, serving as training data for a custom-tailored experience?

            Hell yes.

            What else are a million incels good for? You know they got the wildest fantasies because they’re the furthest divorced from what sex actually is.

            • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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              7 months ago

              I tried reading a selection of some male-targeted romance/erotica once. About a quarter of it was genuinely good, half of it just hated women, and the remainder was like “she was hot and had huge boobs.” Those last two were 50/50 themselves on whether I believed the author had ever touched a boob. Less if you only count consensually. And obviously harems were just fucking everywhere and personality beyond breast size was optional.

              It occurs to me I never read any gay/bi romance, maybe it’s better over there, but the point is:

              I understand your viewpoint, at least in regards to some extreme kinks, but pls no

    • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I’m surprised nobody mentioned the AI training data deal that Google and reddit have.

      The linked article mentions it clearly.

      • catch22@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        The timing of this Reddit bump has led to some conspiracy theories. In February, Google and Reddit announced a blockbuster deal that would let Google train its AI models on Reddit content.

        Reddit should probably be prepared for an onslaught of bots and seo gaming which will further destroy it. Hopefully forum groups like Lemmy don’t go get buried under a mountain of garbage as well. I don’t see anything good about this, as long as advertisers are able to destroy public forums with ads with ad based revenue sites like Google directing them know who to target we will always be creating something great while constantly trying to keep advertisers from turning it into a pile of crap.

  • Bigfoot@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    This is actually a good sign that Google is taking steps to fix their broken search engine. All it seems to deliver anymore as SEO-optimized crap “blogs” with affiliate links. Linking to Reddit without the user having to include “reddit” in the search is a sign they’re actually trying to deliver good results again.

    • rasakaf679@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      You can use -

      intext:“modlog” & “instances” & “docs” & “code” & “join lemmy”

      Just pin it in clipboard. Use it after search to get results from across Lemmy

    • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I don’t know I am getting really shit results on all major search egines lately. Very location specific when I want general information and when I want to have some me times getting decent results, with moderation turned off, is piss poor.

  • mormund@feddit.de
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    7 months ago

    Just in time to not be able to see anything on Reddit without signing in. And I’m sure companies won’t figure out how to astroturf even more.

    • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      reddit.com/r/somesub/comments/123456/some_random_post?share=1

        • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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          7 months ago

          I’m suggesting Reddit could implement a Quora style ?share=1 at the end of the URL as what comes up in Google results. This is why you can click a Quora google result and get an answer, but then clicking any other question/thread brings up an undismissable prompt for you to sign up for an account.

          • bamboo@lemm.ee
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            7 months ago

            Could you then bypass the quora login prompt with a user script that appends ?share=1 to every page?

  • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de
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    7 months ago

    These sites are great for finding answers but Lemmy solves the same problem as they do. I’m actually seeing Lemmy results quite often from google recently too (I’m using SearXNG btw, it displays what search engines individual results are from).

    • IllNess@infosec.pub
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      7 months ago

      Is there anyway to search all Lemmy instances through Google or DuckDuckGo like site:reddit.com?

        • IllNess@infosec.pub
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          7 months ago

          Your suggestion would be great.

          For the time being, I was using OR and shoving the top 8 instances from Lemmy Explorer.

          site:alien.top OR site:lemmy.world OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:lemm.ee OR site:sh.itjust.works OR site:hexbear.net OR site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.dbzer0.com
          

          DuckDuckGo Link

          Google Link

  • Corroded@leminal.space
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    7 months ago

    It makes sense. Adding Reddit to my online searches has been my “life hack” for years now. If only Reddit wasn’t becoming annoying as fuck with things like their new UI, blocking third party apps, and finally blocking off VPN users.

  • jeffw@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I was wondering if the bump was universal or if Google just thought I always wanted to see Reddit results based on my browsing history.

    Also, every time Quora comes up it amazes me that it overtook Yahoo Answers. It’s like Tik Tok vs Vine

    • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I really don’t get how Quora gets ranked so highly in search results when it’s one of the worst sites I’ve ever seen. They somehow managed to fuck up the UI on a Q&A forum. And the answers are wrong like 30% of the time.

    • palordrolap@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      Quora was supposed to be the high-brow answer to Yahoo Answers, but then Yahoo Answers was killed off.

      Eventually the muppets found their way to Quora. Probably by accident at first, but the Quora moderation didn’t stop enough of the muppetry and now it’s just Yahoo Answers pretending not to be.

  • aramis87@fedia.io
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    7 months ago

    Symbiosis. Google drives traffic to reddit (the largest current organic source of natural English content), then harvests all of reddit’s data for their AI.

  • Mikina@programming.dev
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    7 months ago

    First thing I did after I got Kagi was to set lower priority for Reddit results. My search experience has been way better ever since.

  • hahattpro@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    really ? How reddit take over google when reddit is slow and clutter while google still fast ?