As an example: I was doing a search for the best sesame substitute today. Everything that came up was things like, “11 Best Sesame Substitutes,” and I know for a fact that just about everything they suggested tastes nothing like sesame. Just another site trying to get hits. So I added reddit.com into my search parameters and immediately got some decent answers.
I really hate that I have to do that to get anything useful, but there is a ridiculous amount of useful information on Reddit. I hope the fediverse gets to this point as well one day.
Anway, just needed to vent. Lemmy on.
It’s positively maddening. Especially since that Spez has turned Reddit into a walled garden experience now, I no longer want to rely on Reddit for answers. Google is just a mess of garbage blogs full of link rotted ‘answers’.
All the AI generated websites are driving me insane. They just repeat the same thing over and over again with a bunch of useless text.
All the AI generated websites are driving me insane. They just repeat the same thing over and over again with a bunch of useless text.
Reddit moment
I am okay with this. Everyone has wird uncles and reddit felt like home sometimes.
Most of which are AI generated
I no longer used reddit daily. But I still use it (without an account) mainly for research. Reddit no longer exists. It’s just a databse of answers like stack overflow to me.
Interestingly I even relay even less and less on searching reddit through google. I use bing ai and bardai since their dataset upadates daily.
I don’t have access to Bard (Canada) and I don’t use Bing nor Edge, but ChatGPT is usually pretty good at telling me what to look for or giving me an answer that’s close to the real thing or has the right keywords. However, it’s really often just wrong enough that people replacing a search engine with it and use it for information is kind of worrying…
have you tried other engines?
Kagi is good but it’s paid
There is a new search engine https://trystract.com/ that is in Beta. It is interesting in that it’s open source and has a ‘Discussions’ feature that returns some Lemmy results. As it’s a Beta it’s pretty hit or miss right now.
nice
Ugh…I feel this. Recently have been struggling with tennis elbow and without Reddit all I would have had was shitty google web results…blogs, bullshit articles full of clickbait and ads with the same 5 tips. Including reddit I was able to figured out what the actual best information was…without the influence of big media bullshit.
I did check mastodon and Lemmy…nothing really.
The shitty thing is the biggest value reddit has at this point is the years of valuable information WE put into it. Facts and opinions ranked and critiqued and crowdsourced. Our best stories, photos, resources. Despite what people tell themselves, we don’t own any of it. It sucks.
It will. I’ve asked stupid questions on here, that I could have gone to Reddit to find the answers for, just to help out with content.
I still use Reddit for movie megathreads. There’s nowhere else on the internet that I’m able to do that yet. And I’d love to start megathreads here, but I’m not capable of handling such responsibility.
I will try to do my part and ask some stupid questions as well. I have a whole lifetime of experience in being stupid so it shouldn’t be a problem.
Trying to do my part! I’ll try to ask more stupid questions on here. I have plenty of them to ask.
Yep I still search Reddit for answers, but I post content and ask questions here. Which is fine IMO, it’s has always been the people that make the good content, not the platform. There were good hardworking people that made those resources, and so it’s ok to use it till those resources move off site.
One issue with Lemmy is the SEO problem. There are a few Lemmy search tools, but simply googling something doesn’t bring up posts like it would with Reddit. It either needs time, or someone will implement a fix in the source code.
What does it tske to start a megathread?
I agree with the search engine lamenting. In the past I could just paste the terraform resource name in Google and the first hit would be the doc page. Now it doesn’t even deliver me with anything useful 90% of the time.
Google search results really are turning/have turned to s***. Ive gotten better search results out of gpt4 than out of google. And all the “best x” or “best alternatives to y” are just clickbait sites nowadays…
Ironically the web worked better without SEO I guess? Either that or all the content just became rubbish to lure people to add infested clickbait sites harvesting information and serving adds.
I hate how most search result options are either reddit, or some top 10 ranking website with no information, just repeated product information
I use a combination of kagi and ddg which is better for most things than Google. But, if I’m looking for “the best ____,” I still end up on Reddit. 90% of the review site are SEO bombs and/or AI generated nonsense.
At least I’m not signed in anymore 🤷
I like how kagi has a button to show “forum” replies, which very often is Reddit:
I don’t understand what the hell Google is doing. About 10 years ago I wanted to switch to DDG for privacy reasons but didn’t because I preferred the search results I got from Google - I switched to DDG last week to get better results. And it’s not just the main Google search, YouTube too has become terrible. I have a specific niche on youtube that I want to monitor and I’m struggling to use search to find relevant videos and the main page only want to recommend me 10-20 minute long videos of people talking about something. Appearently having all the data in the world isn’t enough to give me relevant results or recommendations.
I guess if GPT ate reddit, once it gets more reliable you can rely on that instead? Not sure if that’s much better though, lol
Hasn’t GPT eaten Reddit already? Genuinely asking.
Yes, every LLM ate reddit but LLMs aren’t aren’t reliable and tend to hallucinate .
On the other hand, one could train an / (ask a big enough) AI to extract useful info from each post, sort it in big categories (life style, science, mechanic,etc ) and subcategories (life tips, male clothe tips, chemistry, animal facts , car engine repair, bike engine repair ) then Do an internet search to check if there are other sources and use it to judge the reliability of the info and put it in a database that the LLM look up before answering. This condensed reddit could likely hold on a few gigs. Maybe there’s a better way to do it but this is the extent of my very limited knowledge.
Sounds like what Bing’s GPT4 Chatbot does
Bing does extract info from sites, including reddit and compare it to other sources but i doubt they’re creating a database. Imagine all the wisdom, knowledge of hundreds of thousands of people but offline and only without the useless arguing and other bullshit.
But how can we accomplish the same with lemmy?
We can’t add Lemmy.com to the google search, and I can’t remember all the lemmy community names either.
Maybe just adding lemmy to the end would work… I usually did what OP did but just using reddit added instead of the whole dot com thing…
That’s my biggest gripe with the fediverse. SEO kinda sucks. I haven’t had any luck with adding lemmy at the end
Some code sorcerer could make a website that searches all.
Already been done, a couple of times iirc
If you search using Boolean strings you can customize your search significantly and not have all those clickbait false positives.
So what’s the best substitute for sesame ?
Appears to be watermelon seed or cashew butter when making hummus.
Oh, you mean tahini. Yeah, I don’t make hummus often enough to keep a jar of tahini from going bad. So I almost never have it on hand. Which means when making hummus I either don’t add a tahini replacement at all, or I use an equal or lesser amount of unsweetened peanut butter, which gives that same mild nuttiness, IMO.
So when you’re making hummus, blend everything else and leave the tahini or its substitute until last, and then taste it before adding anything else. You might like it exactly as is, without the sesame.
EDITED TO ADD yeah, I realize I just totally went off script and left the point of the discussion in the dust, lol. But it’s a good substitution to know when you’re making hummus, so I left it. What the hell, it’s more content for Lemmy.
Lol, totally cool. Maybe one day in the future, when Lemmy is full of content, someone will do a search for sesame substitutes and find this post.
And thanks! I really like the flavor and texture tahini imparts. I’m actually allergic to peanuts, but another nut butter might work out for me.
Do we have a similar way of searching lemmy? Since we all have different addresses, I don’t think the same site: would work.
I found this just now and gave it a try for sesame:
It actually seemed to work really well!
Using site:lemmy.world just returned a result for Sesame Street.
Thanks!
Haven’t seen it mentioned yet, so I’ll add that you can narrow down your search a little with a site qualifier. So you can search “diy table instructions site:reddit.com” to specifically limit results to reddit only (or any site). I’ve personally also found a lot of use by using the same method within a subreddit, “diy table instructions site:reddit.com/r/woodworking”
There’s a lot of good tips at this link. Although it’s an old page, so I dunno if they all work still, ymmv. https://www.ou.edu/webhelp/general/tutorials/google/
I agree with some other posters that hopefully lemmy can grow to fill the boots that reddit is stumbling out of. Although with so many different instances, with different url’s, it seems less straight forward.
I think search engines are going to need a way to understand the fediverse in a deeper way than just the URLs. I don’t know what it would look like exactly, but at least provide some context for the network that this link belongs to.
One method I was considering would be for a search engine to run an instance of each fediverse protocol and index the fediverse that way.
Then the result would take you via the search engine’s instance, and from there you could navigate to the native instance or your home instance using the ! links or whatever. Maybe the search results could offer you multiple links for however you wanted to access it, but the search instance would allow the fediverse links to appear in a common unified way. If you were searching via duckduckgo you’d go to the lemmy.duckduckgo.com domain.
Incidentally if an instance wanted to opt out of search results it’d be as simple as defederating from the search instance.
CrowdView expands the “add reddit.com to the query” idea to include many more sites, including ones that don’t platform extremists for a few more ad impressions.
Ah! That’s really cool! Bookmarking that. Thank you.
That beautiful, simple, and works well. Cheers for the share
Makes sense. What reddit has turned into for me now, is the internets best encyclopedia. And theres no escaping the vast amount of information saved on there, or any chance of finding it elsewhere. Yet
