Google search quality is declining because of too many ads, SEO, and “smart” AI, prompting people to append “reddit” to queries to get more authentic results
Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don't know that are the team at Reddit …
DKB
Context & Ripple Effects
The reported habit of using Reddit as a qualifier identifies a user-level workaround for dissatisfied Google searchers. It was later echoed when users turned to Reddit for product recommendations and other searches in a documented shift toward Reddit as a search alternative.
That workaround matters because it treats Reddit less as a social destination than as a source of answers. Reddit subsequently sought to formalize that role with its own search products, including Reddit Answers and a larger core-search audience.
First-order effects
Google loses some query and referral value when users bypass its ranked results by explicitly routing searches toward Reddit.
Reddit gains search-driven visits and a clearer position as the destination users associate with firsthand recommendations and discussion.
If users continue to rely on community sources to correct for low-trust results, search competition shifts from ranking pages to securing access to distinctive discussion archives.
Publishers and platforms that own those archives gain leverage over AI-search distribution and crawling terms, rather than simply supplying traffic to general search engines.
The trend: Search is fragmenting toward community-owned answer sources, with content access becoming a strategic advantage for both search and AI products.
This feels about right - at least for some areas. But finding the right stuff via Google certainly requires a lot of skills these days. The times of easy, good Google search results seem mostly over. https://twitter.com/...
“Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.” Faszinierend. https://dkb.io/...
This has been true for a while. Organic Google search results are filled with ads and low quality websites who are gaming SEO. I almost always end my searches with Reddit, Wirecutter, or Wiki, depending what I am looking for https://twitter.com/...
@dannysullivan @Carnage4Life I'm a big Google fan in product terms (search, Android, Mail/Workspace, cloud), even though I disagree on policy in some areas (e.g. app distribution). I used quotes maybe 10-15% of the time in the early days and now I hardly find a search without quo…
@Carnage4Life I said that quotes should find the exact quoted word or phrase, and that if they don't, any of us at Google want to know, because that's exactly what they're supposed to do. That's how they should work. It's how we want them to work, and how people expect them to wo…
@dkb868 Here's why people often think quoting with Google doesn't work when it really does (I've looked a huge number of these reports). 1) We match ALT text 2) We match text not readily visible, such as in a menu or small text 3) Page has changed since we indexed it 4) Punctuati…
@Carnage4Life I have a huge degree of sympathy in the cases where we remove punctuation, and as I also said, we're going to look at that more. But that's not a new change and it is a technical match as we've done. I'd like it to be more than a technical match.
@dannysullivan Honestly I think you'd solve a lot of the confusion if you just highlighted the matching text in the result every time. It seems that the matching text is not highlighted in the punctuated case, which leads people to think there isn't an exact match. (And they're s…
Power users, though, want quality results that we can then judge for ourselves. But Google isn't offering that to us any longer. Danny Sullivan can't argue his way out of that criticism. Here's to hoping niche search engines with quality, controlled results make a comeback.
The blog post/SEO spam that people bitch about in results is a symptom of a couple things, but Google Search results tends to throw weight for new content. For answers? It doesn't matter because it's not relying on users to decipher and filter the results.
Google Search changed from providing users results to providing users answers. Full stop. It's not worse or dying, they just stopped caring about bitchy power users like me and OP. “If you find Google Search frustrating, you are no longer their target user.”
“Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don't know that are the team at Reddit, who can't be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we [...] Google, and append the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.” https://dkb.io/...
I will never stop banging this drum. Google is no good anymore. To what degree you realize that is on you. But once it happens... https://twitter.com/...
@dkb868 I work for Google Search, passed your feedback along, thanks. You said in the post that quotes don't give exact matches. They really do. Honest. Put a word or phrase in quotes, that's what we'll match. If anyone has an example where they feel it doesn't, please let me kno…
This is actually a decent solution. Anyone can create a custom search engine with google and restrict it to only the sites you trust. Though you end up in a situation where you're in a tiny bubble and missing out on other potentially cool sites. https://twitter.com/...
I know Google search is dying because Google responded to a user complaint about how their search doesn't work by arguing that it's the users who are wrong. If you have to tell users they're using your product wrong then you've lost. https://dkb.io/... https://twitter.com/...
Certainly didn't mean to be inflammatory to Reddit, and I'm sure their search is being worked on and is continuously improving. But one of these search results is clearly better than the other. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.” https://dkb.io/...