How users discover information on the internet is changing
Reddit’s search engine is notoriously awful, if I wanted to find something on Reddit I would Google it with site:reddit.com in the query, that gets great results.
As for Tik Tok, isn’t that a short video site? Its very popular and clearly good at what it does, but how can I search it for a Wikipedia article, or a rotten tomatoes review of a film I’m interested in, or bus timetables, or opening times for a local store, or helpful coding solutions, or wiring diagrams for circuits, or converting values or translating text, or any of the many, many more things I use Google for every day.
On a personal note, while I’ve sold my soul to one or two major western corporations, I’m never going to willingly provide the Chinese government with any more information about me than it may already have. Certainly not about to start directly informing them of my searching or video watching habits.
Nor will I ever support their genocides and many other human rights violations and evil cruelties if I can avoid it. Tik Tok isn’t just some hip new app that’s cool to use, it’s an evil fascist government’s tool for surveillance and control.
Crazy thing is, I’m not even a conspiracy nut, I’m just citing a well known fact, and yet people keep using it anyway because they just don’t care :-(
………genocides? That requires a fuckassload of elaboration. To my knowledge, which is an unfortunate amount, the modern Chinese state hasn’t engaged in anything which could be labled a genocide. The US state, however, is currently sanctioning (a lighter form but still a form/method of genocide) multiple nations for no reasons they can explain properly. Cuba being chief among them. Support of Israel and Saudi Arabia (and others) is also supporting genocide (of the Palestinians and the Yemenis respectively).
China on the other hand, in the last couple decades, has been “accused” of “cultural genocide” an important word to note is cultural… they then made changes to the tactics of imprisoning Uyghurs, which is debatable how much/how bad it was to begin with, and basically all the stuff anyone could complain about in that respect has either been disproven or corrected. The US has absolutely no moral ground to stand on here though considering the historic and ongoing treatment of black and indigenous peoples in the US which are treated insanely far worse than anything ever accused of China in regards to the Uyghurs, which again, they stopped doing the spying and arresting/harassment shit once people complained. That’s kind of the difference between the US and China… China usually stops doing shitty shit when people call them out on it (if it was ever even shitty or real to begin with- many stories the US state dept tries to push (remember that balloon thing? Lmao) are straight up lies based on Sinophobia).
It’s incredibly odd to criticize China, admit western nations have and are fucking you harder, but then still rail against China so hard. My advice: change what you can change. That means change the laws and the actions of the western government you live under. Once that is done THEN you can perhaps criticize foreign governments. Further advice: do so on things they’ve actually done, not made up or super exaggerated projections from the western state departments/media (same thing).
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It’s no use. Getting a lemmygrad user to accept uyghur and falun gong genocides is about as futile as trying to convince a covid denier to get a vaccine. CCP can do no wrong in their eyes.
Wikipedia……… sigh
I’m only typing this for people who actually want to, I dunno, look into stuff and not just suck the garbage shoveled directly from the CIA/state dept/etc. into their mouths/assholes. It’s not for this lost child.
I already did TWO of my “i will allow myself to rot my brain with morons for their benefit, not mine” posts today. My allotment is one. I’m not giving a third. So you get the short, “feel free to google” version. No apologies.
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Wikipedia is dogshit. Not for the reasons your university professor told you, but yes also those, but because it caters almost nearly exclusively to… a western/US/EU audience. That is not good when the majority of the world is… not. Who edits wikipedia? Who is allowed? Yes, you guessed correctly. In an effort to appear “fair” they just allow basically anything which can be “”””””””””””””””””””””sourced””””””””””””””””””””” ie some Nazi in his basement slammed out an article on killthechineseusinglemmy.net (a website you’d surely enjoy if it existed)
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second and I’m just not typing more after this. Again, google, bing, duckduckgo your way to knowing more shit if you want. I’ll be kind enough to tell you what NOT to read/watch if you want to ask. Hint: if it bangs on about a omega total genocide! in China, then, you know… move on. Very Long story very short since you lack the ability to read (but a little bit of a story for not-you). It has been investigated. Yes. It has. The findings were, in short summary as I already fucking said, the Chinese gov spied on, arrested, harassed, etc. members of the Muslim population that I already wrote about, once again, but you cannot read apparently and monkey smash BHHUUUJHAHAHAH GENOCIDE CHINA TANKIE IMANAZI.com into google and got the Wikipedia full of bullshit. Did you read any of it? No. You wouldn’t be fucking posting about it if you did. Is arresting someone for no apparently good reason a good thing? Sure isn’t! Is it…… genocide? SURE IS NOT! The findings were, in short, that Z E R O people were killed! Zero. Read the shit! Z E R O! Not a genocide already. “But the culture!” Ok. So if you just want to make up words and phrases which normal people call “being a dickbag” “being racist (more of an ethnic thing, but point stands)” and whatever else, I mean go ahead, but also, no. Do not go ahead. Genocide means something specific. Purposeful targeted eradication of a group of people for their ethnicity, race, religion, etc. This was certainly targeted and WOULD BE a genocide if the Chinese government were arresting and then killing them. There isn’t a single shred of evidence for that happening though. Not even evidence of, like, bussing them en masse from the area. Some people got arrested WHICH WAS BAD BUT NOT GENOCIDE for no apparent reason besides being Muslim/not going along with Chinese policy. That was bad! But guess what? The gov stopped as soon as this shit hit the world. They literally fucking stopped all of it due to external but mostly due to internal pressures. I can’t claim, no one can, that everything there is perfect now. But what everyone who can read can claim is: there was never a genocide. There was some bad shit like targetted arrests. And then it ended once people objected outside the targeted community. And that’s basically the end of it.
(Since you love Wikipedia so much google the rates of black people imprisoned and murdered by United States authorities every day/year. Is that a genocide? (Yes). It FAR worse than anything done by China outside of, hey, one time a very long time ago when a shitty horrible kid raping cult got subjected to their authority. One bad thing China definitely did do though was fucking with Vietnam. But even there the US was INSANELY far worse. And which country do you live in again? Where do you vote? Who can you influence? Is the answer China? No? Then fix your own fucking country you Sinophobic disgusting ape.)
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Is invading Tibet and the raping and killing everyone there not a crime to you? I agree with Palestine but don’t pretend like China doesn’t try to invade Taiwan every other week, they literally fire missiles into Taiwanese airspace all the time. The Uyghur genocide; invading Mongolia and forcing everyone there to mine coal at gunpoint?
No country around China wants to be a part of China, that’s their right, so why defend a country that has nothing but Imperialistic intentions if you’re anti-Imperialist? China loves to whip black people to death in Africa too, is that cool with you? I hope it’s not
They are not anti-imperialist. They want a planetary empire encompassing all our planet, no exceptions, which will fulfill various commie utopia images, like united humanity colonizing other star systems etc.
I mean, their idea of anti-imperialist is not that empires are too aggressive in killing and robbing, but that they are too modest to stop at that instead of integrating what they conquer.
Yeah I’ve notice how Google search has increasingly become an ad delivery engine.
Amazon now pushes tons of cheap Chinese trash the likes of wish.com, Google pushes fucking irrelevant ads, and Reddit just went down the toilet. I’m really seeing everything great become shitty first hand :(
Amazon is at least finally realizing their error, and is starting to root out a lot of the pop up chinese sellers.
I mostly just use it to see what options are out there, and a general price point, then go buy it from a nearby shop.
SEO killed the search. Everything now is just autogenerated blogs with popup windows and affiliated links to amazon.
“Reddit vs Google for search”
Here’s 47 sites like topcomparisons.com and bigdifferences.net
Thanks Google. Prime shit
I do not understand why Google has become so ossified. They must know they’re strangling their own business, surely? Do they somehow think they’re irreplaceable? That no one will ever build a better search engine? And the best they can come up with is AI-generated search nonsense? As if that’s going to help.
Stop trying to make maximum profits for minimum effort, fire whatever useless exec is in charge over there, and get someone who actually wants to fix things before someone eats your lunch, Google!
Why not useDDG instead of all the weird options mentioned in the article?
Bing is fine. DDG uses it. Adding reddit to your search is an old trick. Only searching with TikTok was new and weird for me. I have no Idea how this works.
Considering the TikTok user demographics, you’d do better without its search results.
If you want to push the “reddit search trick” further, CrowdView expands it to include other forums that have a higher signal to noise ratio than the rest of the internet.
Yeah, I either use Ecosia or DuckDuckGo these days. Ecosia is ok if you carefully craft your query.
@zecg SO TOO WITH ALTAVISTA
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All searches are just now 99% filler and its extremely difficult to find the actual information you’re looking for.
I remember when Google search was almost a flat search and the needed result was usually at 10th page or something.
It still was there, though. Not the case now sometimes.
But reddit’s search sucks!
I type my question in Google with reddit at the end. Then my lovely Firefox extension redirects me to the web archive version.
I worked for Google for about 10 years, and when I started they definitely knew Bing was a strong enough competitor to eat their lunch if they slacked off in the constant arms race against malicious SEO. I wonder what happened.
If you can’t defeat them, join them is what happened
Not surprising really. Google has decided that it really doesn’t want me to use it so I switched to DDG a couple of years ago. And it doesn’t feel like I’ve lost anything of value.
It’s sad that search is in the state its in these days. It’s harder to find useful or in-depth information. The first results are always someone who has used SEO to get to the top of the results to sell their product or just other garbage. If you really wanted to find people’s opinions on things, adding site:reddit.com/r/whatever_topic to your search really was the best way.
I’ve been finding ChatGPT increasingly useful lately, both because ChatGPT is useful and because Google search feels like it’s been in decline.
I’m not a coder. At all. I probably have slightly better understanding than the average non-coder, but looking at code tends to make my eyes glaze over. I’m typically good with the logic of what I want to happen, but the syntax and simply knowing what functions are available are things I really struggle with.
A few days ago, I decided I wanted to make a somewhat simple script. I spent several hours trying things, googling for solutions to the problems I encountered, and ultimately I got nowhere. Yesterday, I decided I should give ChatGPT a go. Not only did I get ChatGPT to write the entire script for me, with me just giving it prompts on what I wanted it to do, but it managed to explain pretty much everything it was doing - with answers tailored to my exact code. When things didn’t work, it could speculate on why it might not have worked, and try alternative solutions.
It was a fairly collaborative process. There were points where I could see things that ChatGPT hadn’t caught, like certain lines of code that had become unnecessary after iterating, or that variables hadn’t been defined properly, and I could point then out and it’d fix them.
Using ChatGPT isn’t entirely the same as googling for information, but I think you have to take a fairly similar approach with how you use both. Your language has to be precise and clear, you need to have an understanding of what output you want, and how to tailor your input to achieve that output. And you need to understand how to use the output it gives you - sometimes it’ll be wrong, or only partial. Sometimes it’ll require further steps to get the final result you’re looking for.
Yeah ive heard that ChatGPT and the like are actually pretty good options for some things. Maybe i’ll try them out some more. Thanks for the insight.
I use google. I type “<insert thing I am looking up> reddit”
lemmy replacing reddit in this one is exactly what i want. it will take time but it would be great if does the job one day.
For starters I think Lemmy search engine is better than Reddit’s.
idk about search engine but what i meant in my last comment is about is the content that’s available on the reddit. to be a replacement of all those content that was on reddit having answer for variety of things is not something lemmy can do easily.
Reddit is to be expected but TikTok, really?! I can’t see it a suitable as a search engine+ What an awful experience I had with that platform, it kept showing me garbage content in the 2 times I tried it and yes I tried the “don’t show me this type of content anymore” option and it didn’t change anything
Lol was this written a year ago? All the homies use AI powered search now. Bing chat is surprisingly good for me
Whiney Bing is useless for me.
