[Guest19023892]

I'll toss out a crazy idea to compete with Google.

1. You buy StackOverflow for $2 billion and Reddit for $10 billion.

2. You block Google from indexing the sites.

3. You start a new search engine that only searches StackOverflow and Reddit.

4. As the new search engine gains traction, you invite other high quality sites to join your vision and search engine. One requirement is they must block Google. You can guarantee them decent traffic because they'll only be competing against a dozen sites on your search engine, instead of millions on Google.

5. A large number of respectable sites leave Google and are only available on your search engine. Businesses start becoming eager to join your exclusive network and ask to join your mission.

6. Google is left with blog and affiliate SEO spam, and you become the hero of the search engine world.

[remus]

Don't forget step 4.5:

As your search engine tips in to popularity all sites on it are overrun with spammy SEO content as marketers search for the next way to get more eyeballs on their ads.

[nsgi]

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones.

Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?

[esperent]

So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who are trying to sell it to me.

So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit. YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.

Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.

Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?

Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.

[petra]

The problem with reddit is that the comments there could also be ads, and it's harder to tell.

[noogle]

Ranking results by author's credibility (site karma) could help, at least for the time being.

It's not that the comments are plain ads (these will be easy for the reader to discern), it's dishonest product reviews. It's an unsolved problem in e-commerce websites and even in real life.

[freeflight]

Tho marketers are slowly catching on to this with product placements on Reddit.

[wccrawford]

A lot of people add "reddit" to their search results for certain types of searches, including product reviews. It provides a ton of information from real people and cuts a lot of the garbage out.

[OscarCunningham]

So why is it that I can never find my old reddit comments if I want to refer back to them?

[optimalsolver]

Try this and search by your username:

https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/

[OscarCunningham]

Thank you! For some reason other reddit searching apps don't seem to work for me, but that one does.

[samwestdev]

Great way to kill both Reddit and SO lol

[derefr]

If a site allows crawling by at least one public-Internet spider, is there any legal protection it has against other crawlers who choose to ignore robots.txt and crawl anyway? Because I feel like that's exactly what Google would do here, as long as it wasn't literally illegal for them to do so.

[Sirened]

It's kinda unclear at the moment, but it's working its way through the courts! See HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn [1] in which HiQ was scraping public profiles and was blocked from doing so by LinkedIn. This made its way to court and the 9th circuit ruled they were allowed to scrape but SCOTUS later rejected the decision and sent it back. So—murky!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

[sfe22]

You can still block googles ip’s manually

[randomsilence]

Google has prepared counter-moves for every step of your path. E.g. can you guarantee (2) against all moves Google could make?

Even if you succeed in securing an island of quality content: How big is your audience? I don't remember the exact quote but somebody said that television is the way it is because that's what people want.

Yahoo should have chosen to become a media company. Now they would have all the knowledge to mix search results in a way that is rewarded by the market. It's the academics of the early internet who want the best results. Everybody else wants to be entertained.

[glenstein]

Huh? What counter moves? You buy Reddit, Google buys X? Why would that be inevitable, and why, if there is a counter move, would it function as a stopper or defeater rather than just as some separate thing that also exists? What even is the other reddit? Why wouldn't google's prospective counter acquisition just say no to their offer? And is it an acquisition, right, or does Google build something to compete? And why would that work, given googles history of abandoning it's own projects to the Google graveyard? And where even is the precedent for this kind of reactionary behavior as a strategic actor? Wouldn't Google just ignore it, focus on it's core products like it always does? This just sounds like a kid playing with action figures.

And that's just the first sentence!

It's also just kind of frustrating because it's the kind of response that comes from a place of refusing to engage with a hypothetical exercise. Failing to meet these exercises with the spirit of open-ended curiosity, as they loosen suspension of disbelief just enough to make it possible to canvas the space of strategic possibilities, is a misunderstanding of the exercise, and it's just the kind of sleepwalking response that turns potentially fruitful conversations into dreary dead ends.

[pyro123]

Couldn't that backfire though. Most people imo would find it it infuriating to jump between search engines at first leading to plenty new alternatives taking over ultimately leading to the demise of the above mentioned sites.

[windex]

Doesn't google have something called the Google CSE where you specify which sites you will exclusively include in search results?

[gowthamgts12]

yes, but it's limited in terms of number of searches you can do and also they'll run ads on free version.

[mrkramer]

I think this would spark all out search engine war. It would further degrade quality of search engines actually their usability since web content would be fragmented between different search engines.

But theoretically speaking Reddit for example can say "We don't like Google" and change their robots.txt rules in order to block Google bots.

[lvl102]

Reddit for $10B? It’s going to be worth more than $50B by June.

[tomp]

0. Incorporate a company called "WeSearch"