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

  • _haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    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.

      • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        It’s a paid service that in return respects privacy, and has results as good as Google’s.

        Google doesn’t say “Fuck you, Pay me” because you are the product.

          • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            I’d say in a good bit of cases better than Google now. Each time I’ve resorted to Google because I think I’m getting lackluster results, it’s got the same results but also a bunch of SEO dogshit I have to sort through. Kagi’s personal site ranking and filters make it worth it too.

          • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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            4 months ago

            Definitely old Google. Searx etc probably already better than current Google. Kagi has free trial though. I used free trial like 13 times before I realized it was time to pay the entry level 300 search fee and have no regrets about the value.

      • capital@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        A service that gasp costs money???

        It surfaces better results for me than others so I’m paying for a service that I gain benefit from. Feel free not to…

      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        I like where I stand in that model. I’ve tried the alternatives and have found genuine value in what I’m paying for. Lemmy loves turning its nose up at Kagi because “money” but they’ve gone out of their way to index the fediverse where most have ignored us. I’m an anonymous Kagi user I pay through a third party using a crypto account and I couldn’t be happier - they now have a lower tiered payment plan that is affordable for me.

    • meliaesc@lemmynsfw.com
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      4 months ago

      The number of obscure guides and download collections… I do pray someone is archiving it properly.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’m not understanding what stops a search engine from scraping a publicly accessible website. ?

    • Eril@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      robots.txt, I guess? Yes, you can just ignore it, but you shouldn’t, if you develop a responsible web scraper.

      • reddig33@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Doesn’t seem legal that a robots.txt could pick and choose who scrapes. Seems like legally it would have to be all or nothing. Here’s hoping one of the search engines ignores it and makes it a legal case.

        • capital@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          You’d probably feel differently if it were your service. Should you be able to control who scrapes your sites or should that be all or nothing?

          For the record, I fucking hate what the internet is becoming. I naively believed that even if shit got cordoned off into the walled gardens that are mobile phone apps, the web would remain as open as it was. This is a terrible sign of things to come.

          • reddig33@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            No, I wouldn’t feel differently. In fact letting search engines scrape and point to your content is what leads people to your site. It’s free advertising. If you’re going to let one search engine in, you should let them all in. If you want to be public, be public. Otherwise put up a login firewall and go private.

            • capital@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              It’s not just search engines. Lots of people on Mastodon were using robots.txt to block ChatGPT (and any other LLM company they knew of) from scraping their sites/blogs.

              I disagree, to a point. I want to be able to control my services to the greatest extent possible, including picking who scrapes me.

              On the other hand, orgs as large as Google doing this poses a real threat to how the internet works right now which I hate.

        • Eril@feddit.org
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          4 months ago

          Actually currently it contains this:

          User-agent: *
          Disallow: /
          

          Well, that actually is a blanket ban for everyone, so something else must be at play here.

      • hotpot8toe@lemmy.worldOP
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        4 months ago

        Also, rate limiting. A publicly accessible website doesn’t mean that it will allow scrapers to read millions of pages each week. They can easily identify and block scrapers because of the pattern of their activity. I don’t know if Reddit has rate-limiting, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they implement one.

  • III@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Great, neither Google search or reddit work anymore. They deserve each other.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I literally only use Reddit for one particular game sub and nothing else, so I just go directly there. I literally have no other use for it, so this change means exactly diddly dick to me.

  • BurnSquirrel@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Still couldn’t get me to use it, I use DDG which can switch between search engines and search sites very quickly with it’s ! syntax (Everyone goes on about privacy, but this is pretty much it’s best feature). Google results are consistently the worst for me if I’m hitting multiple search engines

  • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    DuckDuckGo hasn’t been returning good reddit results for months… sigh. (Sometimes reddit has the only discourse on e.g. some error a SaaS product is throwing.)

  • TheDarksteel94@sopuli.xyz
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    4 months ago

    Personally, I really wish it was as easy to search for Lemmy posts with a search engine as it is with Reddit. Idk, maybe I’m doing it wrong.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Reddit really fucked themselves. Not as much as Elon fucked twitter but super close.

    Also pretty sure DDG uses Bing