[BlackLotus89]

> I have been thinking about the same problem since a few weeks. The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left.

That's not actually the problem described here. His problem is actually a bit deeper rootet since he specified the exact parameters of what he wants to see, but got terrible results. He specified a search for "site:reddit.com" but the resilts he got were ireelevant and worse than the results that he would have got when searching reddit directly.

I don't say that SEO, sites that copy content and only want to genrate clicks and large sites that culminate everything are bad fkr the internet of today, but the level of results we get off of search engines today is with one word abysmal.

[mattmcknight]

Wrong. The site query worked. The issue is that there is no clear way to determine information date, as pages themselves change. Since more recent results are favored, SEO strategy of freshness throws off date queries. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history...

[BlackLotus89]

Wrong. In the article he elaborates.

> As you can see, I didn’t even bother clicking on all of them now, but I can tell you the first result is deeply irrelevant and the second one leads to a 4 year old thread.

He also wrote

> At this point I visibly checked on reddit if there’ve been posts about buying a phone from the last month and there are.

Duckduckgo even recognized the date to be 4 years old and reddit doesn't hide the age of posts. There are newer more fitting posts, but they aren't shown. And again a quote

> Why are the results reported as recent when they are from years ago, I don’t know - those are archived post so no changes have been made.

So your argument (also it really is a problem) in this case is a red herring. The problem lies deeper since google seems to be unable to do something as simple as extracting the right date and ddg ignores it. Also since all the results are years old it adds to the confusion why the results don't match the query. (He also wrote that the better matches were indeed indexed, but not found)

[mattmcknight]

You said this wrong thing: He specified a search for "site:reddit.com" and claimed it was irrelevant. THAT IS NOT A RELEVANCY TERM. It correctly scopes searches to the specified site.

The entirety of the problem is the date query is not working, because of SEO for freshness. You also said this other wrong thing: "That's not actually the problem described here" . That is the problem here. The page shows up as being updated because of SEO.

The date in a search engine is the date the page was last judged to be updated, not one of the many dates that may be present on the page. When was the last reddit design update? Do you think that didn't cause the pages to change? Wake up.

[Mauricio_]

>but the resilts he got were ireelevant and worse than the results that he would have got when searching reddit directly

Wrong. Internal reddit search has bad results too, and why even let you filter by last month.