Reddit? The site with a search so bad, I had to use external search engines? Great idea.

Also, Reddit offers their own AI Q&A? The site that prominently poisend many Google AI summaries? What are they even smoking at this point?

Problem is they’ve been smoking whatever Google AI recommends for too long now

Alternative title: "Reddit plans to make sh**load of dollars from data we've all left there for free".

Ah yes, the site controlled by Spez that's blocked for people who are in the UK and are under 18 or don't want to violate their privacy to verify their age.

The site that prominently poisend many Google AI summaries

The site that made huge bank by selling API access to Google so Google could poison its own search results with shitty AI summaries.

reddit

search engine

Huh, ok. Hope they finally fix their own aearch engine. It's only been broken for about 20 years.

“Hey if we introduce new features, that line will go up”.

In reality it’s trying to be something it’s not, and most ideas contribute to enshittification.

i don't think they are fixing it. Even they aren't able to fix their own android app in these 20 years. Maybe they need assistance from some lemmy developers!

You're absolutely correct!

Well click-through is getting worse and worse the more search engines just give answers themselves without losing you to the actual websites. This must also or even especially affect reddits ability to capitalize the user generated content through ads. Not sure if trying to enter a field that is currently killing itself by showing ai summaries instead of search results is a good move though...

I was doing research on a topic yesterday and Reddit threads 3 to 5 years showed up. So I checked them out. The comments randomly had words and phrases made to look like a hyperlink, but with a magnifying glass at the end, sprinkled around. I’ve never noticed it before yesterday, but honestly if I go there, I’m usually using old.reddit.

So I clicked a few, and they all took me to a Reddit search interface. The best part was they all had no results. So, working as expected.

Tip to any readers that don't know, you can get search results from a specific website adding site: followed by the domain.

For example, if you want to limit the results to reddit.com and you want to search for fuck spez:

fuck spez site:reddit.com

This also works with subreddits. If you want to look for vince in the r/nba subreddit:

vince site:reddit.com/r/nba

I am pretty sure this works with subdomains too, I just can't think of any examples off the top of my head that would be useful.

I tested this with Google, Duckduckgo, and Bing. It works for all of them.

So you want me to use a search engine by a company that is notorious for their sensorship? Go fuck all the way off.

I think I’ve seen this in YouTube comments as well.

And Reddit can blame only themselves for it:

February 23, 2024 / 12:35 PM EST / CBS/AP
Google strikes $60 million deal with Reddit, allowing search giant to train AI models on human posts
... from the online discussion site for training its artificial intelligence models and to improve services such as Google Search.

Are you dumb? Am not the developer of that reddit feature and it's not a promotion. It's just a news. Do it yourself you fuc*ing coward.

I painstakingly took a journey to hand delete each and every one of my posts and comments and then delete my user name. They got no free stuff outa me.