Like, for example I have a specific issue with a digital audio converter by a popular brand but their customer service is awful. A simple google prompt followed by site:reddit.com would yield solutions almost every time. In fact I would say I did 90% of my googling that way. How do I break this cycle and do you feel this is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing? If anything, Reddit remains the biggest repo of easily accessible solutions for anything. We’re seeing right now what happens if this is being taken away by subs going private. Vanilla Google is a shitshow.

      • Emanresu@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’ll be glad if google dies off from this. I remember when i could search and get a few great links for each interpretation of the word. Now google just gives the most profitable result and a thousand copies of that same result.

  • Nankeru@kbin.social
    5·
    1 year ago

    I stopped using Google because of this specific reason.

    Kagi, hands down, is by far the best search engine I’ve ever used (next to Neeva, which got bought and shut down) without looking for Reddit results all the time.

    Just simple searches like “Best gaming headphones” or “Realtek Driver Download” and comparing them with Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, etc. shows how the quality of the results are far superior.

    And you can directly define, which sites you’d like to see higher / more results of or less - or even completely block or pin them to the top.

    Also, it also shows you directly, before visiting a site, in colors if a site has a very high number of ads and/or trackers.

    And they support for power users custom CSS to adjust everything, URL rewrites (e.g. change all Reddit URLs to old.reddit or to automatically open libreddit or archive.org versions), DDG and custom bangs, and much more.

    Lastly, I created a so-called “Lens”, which allows me to search Lemmy / Kbin content only (also still have one for Reddit).
    Meaning with one click, it shows me results from only sites or keywords I’ve defined - see image.

    Very satisfied with it, can only recommend.

    (copied from another thread I replied to)

    • Dog
      1·
      1 year ago

      uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

      trying it, sounds awesome

    • mPony@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      my first instinct was “oh great another site that makes me create an account” but I have to say that feature-set looks impressive.

  • wrath-sedan@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    A few things come to mind that I don’t think have been mentioned:

    1. libreddit - a private front-end for Reddit that should avoid your traffic monetizing Reddit

    2. Old.Reddit + uBlock - should similarly help avoid monetization by blocking ads

    3. Ask your question on the threadiverse! - probably not as convenient as a google search but gotta start building an alternative knowledge base somewhere

    The first two obviously won’t help with private subreddits, more to keep Reddit from making money by hoarding all of our data. It’s going to be a rough transition for many of us.

  • readas@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure if there is a good solution. We’re just in the soup. Part of the mess that’s happening is because Reddit can be so good at giving proper answers. In my experience, at least in smaller communities, you have people that care and are curious.

    So your question about a DAC is answered by someone who loves audio and bitrates and was into it for months or years before you even knew you’d have the question.

    To fix trash search, AI is just chewing up all those old answers in the hope that it’ll be as “smart” about rowing as the woman on the subreddit who rowed for 10 years and coached for 5 and gave thoughtful answers to some college kid.

    We’re in the middle of a… a something. And everything will just be shittier for a minute. The algorithms will feast on what’s buried in Reddit and become “smart” enough to give a passable answer, but then we run into the issue of new “smarts”… I don’t think AI will be able to generate new “smart” of any value. It’ll need to be trained by people and who knows if there will be dedicated people pouring info into a new repository.

    • Elle@lemmy.worldMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Part of the mess that’s happening is because Reddit can be so good at giving proper answers. In my experience, at least in smaller communities, you have people that care and are curious.

      I think you struck at the real answer to OP with this, personally. As search engines degrade in pursuit of profits, we’re forced back to the basic model of information exchange, communicating with each other.

      The real reason Reddit became such a resource of information was because it was such a central site of information exchange courtesy of its communities. What this means is that to get away from searching a single site and even relying on a single search engine, is that we rely on each other for information as we really always have.

      I know that may sound kinda cheesy, but it’s ultimately true. It’s one of the reasons Discord servers are so popular, in some cases almost exceeding wikis.

  • nosut@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    Visiting for basic information now and again isn’t going to provide a ton for them. As long as you are not providing new content or doom scrolling it’s fine IMO.

    • frodo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      This has been my mindset as well. This is an awkward phase where Reddit alternatives are still being built out and millions of people are trying to find their home. Once the dust settles and communities build up, I hope to use the fediverse as I did site:reddit.com.

      But for now, I think its okay to get information from reddit and bounce right after. Depending on what you’re looking for, ChatGPT does seem to be a decent alternative to both Google and Reddit at the same time, though.

      • Elle@lemmy.worldMEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        ChatGPT does seem to be a decent alternative to both Google and Reddit at the same time, though.

        A detail to remember with this, however, is that it’s not a search engine, but a robust text composition/“generation” tool. I recognize that it does tend to get certain info correct rather consistently, but it’s both error-prone and a basic misuse of it to use it for research imo.

  • Cloudless@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Bing Chat. It is ChatGPT-4 with internet access. It shows you the sources so you can verify the results.

  • get_the_reference_@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    To give a very literal example (which may or may not be ideal but will remove the Reddit links), use

    grounded best tier 3 gear -site:reddit.com

    • phoenixes@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      This isn’t answering the actual question, which is how to substitute for the fact that including reddit explicitly was often one of the only ways to get good results. (Especially to get results that aren’t just shitty collated/auto-generated “answer” websites, which are like half of my results sometimes these days)