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.
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.
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.
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 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 participate in the conversation at Reddit anymore (deleted my account), but if I’m searching for something I still do the old Reddit Google trick. There’s still a wealth of info there.
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
Is it because the way the fediverse works or just because there isn’t enough topics about it?..
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.
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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.
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Haha no worries! I am allergic to a lot of foods, and there’s no way you could have known. I’m actually also allergic to chickpeas, too 😂 so I make hummus out of white beans and/or fava beans. Tastes very good.
I was originally curious because I thought it might be fun to start a supper club for people with food allergies. Sesame allergies are very common.
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Thank you! Will try it out with black beans sometime for sure.
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!
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
We’ll just have to endure it for a while.
But if we just keep talking about our needs and favorite topics in the Fediverse, it will grow and grow. 🌱🌲
Trying to do my part!
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
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.
Just throwing this out there but you can make a custom Google search set up only to search for links from lemmy instances but you need to know how to use Google search syntax and have to find and add lemmy instances to add
