%%excerpt%% Reddit has commenced its assault on search engines, blocking those that don’t have a commercial relationship with the company, like Google.
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.
Reddit responded: "Only google pays us". The content is not yours. You built this of naive user base that just wanted to share now these fuckers are taking it as their entitlement. As early an reddit user - fuck that place, I'm still angry.
I wish Lemmy were searchable better. The search function actually works decently well, but it's not on the same level of actual search engines, it doesn't seem to look for related/similar terms and also relevancy doesn't seem right.
Google just enshittifying even harder. Reddit results in Google searches are often old and anemic these days.
I used to want Reddit threads to show up in search results. Now I avoid them because they are so often a waste of time. More reason to use Duck Duck Go.
I work for a different sort of company that hosts some publicly available user generated content. And honestly the crawlers can be a serious engineering cost for us, and supporting them is simply not part of our product offering.
I can see how reddit users might have different expectations. But I just wanted to offer a perspective. (I'm not saying it's the right or best path.)
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?
Instead of investing money in stop crawlers why do not make the data they are trying to crawl available to everyone for free so we can have a better world all together?