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  • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Hi, I’m new here. Because of the bullshit with Reddit. Greetings fellow Lemmy people.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      Blocking other search engines will hurt Reddit, all else held equal. But not by that much. Google is seriously dominant in the search engine market.

      kagis

      Yeah.

      https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

      According to this, Google has 91.06% of the search engine market. So for Reddit, they’re talking about cutting themselves off from a little under 9% of people searching out there. Which…I mean, it isn’t insignificant, but it isn’t likely gonna hurt them all that badly.

      • eronth@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        It’s also worth noting that the 9% they cut off was probably the group more inclined to already be using alternatives to Reddit anyways.

          • whatwhatwhatwhat@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Seconding this. I work in IT, and the number of tech-illiterate people using DuckDuckGo as their default search engine is astounding. It’s got to be about 10% of our users (none of whom are in tech roles).

  • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    I’ve posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating:

    Just use ddg bangs if you use Duckduckgo and you can search reddit directly.

    !reddit search term

    or:

    !r search term

    It still picks up latest posts related to reddit, it just searches reddit directly instead of searching Bing’s results. It’s that simple.

    You can even use a redirect extension like Libredirect in conjunction with this Duckduckgo feature to redirect your search to a privacy respecting frontend like redlib.

      • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        I used to sneer at the kids in my class that used it. Must have been fairly shortly after it launched, something like fourteen to fifteen years ago. I’m still grappling with a certain inertia when it comes to switching away from something I have relied on for so long, but I’m coming around to the idea of giving DDG a try at least (irrational as it is, I’ve been reluctant to even try - I suspect out of fear of liking it and having to change).

        Past Me would be exasperated that Present Me is even toying with the idea. But then, Past Me had a lot of stupid takes anyway.

        • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          I went through the same process that you’re describing. In the end, I gave it a shot and, anecdotally, I feel like I find the things I’m looking for faster than I was with Google and with no shoddy ai summaries.

          • noli@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            I like to say that DDG gives you what you searched for while google gives you what it thinks you wanted.

  • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I’m kind of curious to understand how they’re blocking other search engines. I was under the impression that search engines just viewed the same pages we do to search through, and the only way to ‘hide’ things from them was to not have them publicly available. Is this something that other search engines could choose to circumvent if they decided to?

    • Madis@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Search engine crawlers identify themselves (user agents), so they can be prevented by both honor-based system (robots.txt) and active blocking (error 403 or similar) when attempted.

      • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Thank you, I understand better now. So in theory, if one of the other search engines chose to not have their crawler identify itself, it would be more difficult for them to be blocked.

        • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
          01·
          3 months ago

          This is where you get into the whole webscraping debate you also have with LLM “datasets”.

          If you, as a website host, are detecting a ton of requests coming from a singular IP you can block said address. There are ways around that by making the requests from different IP addresses, but there are other ways to detect that too!

          I’m not sure if Reddit would try to sue Microsoft or DDG if they started serving results anyway through such methods. I don’t believe it is explicitly disallowed.
          But if you were hoping to deal in any way with Reddit in the future I doubt a move like this would get you in their good graces.

          All that is to say; I won’t visit Reddit at all anymore now that their results won’t even show up when I search for something. This is a terrible move and will likely fracture the internet even more as other websites may look to replicate this additional source of revenue.

  • KroninJ@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    It’s still possible to search with “site:reddit.com …”

    Has it been implemented yet or are they blocking non-flagged searches? Which seems odd.

    • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      01·
      3 months ago

      You shouldn’t be getting any new results if you do that, older posts will/may remain indexed.

  • Babalugats@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    They’re also blocking posts by users who aren’t banned or even got a warning. It appears to the user as though it’s been posted, but it hasn’t.