Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now, Thanks to AI Deal

"We believe in an open internet... as long as you use these specific services."

This really sucks. So we're looking at a future where search engines are like streaming services now. "Hmmm now which search engine was <insert website here> on?"

That's why I use a SearXng instance. Why bother searching for something on 1 instance when you could search for it on 5 and then correlate the results.

I don’t have a ton of knowledge in this area, but this seems like it should run afoul of antitrust regulations?

Given lawmakers that understand how the internet works, I think it would be. To me this isn't any different than a handful of years back when ISPs were throttling websites to give an advantage to the certain ones that paid them to work faster.
That was my first thought too. Yet another reason to vote for Dems this November - only one party actually gives a shit about enforcing antitrust regulations!
- are you absolutely positive the democrats give a shit about antitrust regulations? Biden did actively strike break.
Who should be regulated, Google or Reddit? Reddit updated there robots.txt to disallow everything. As it's their site, I guess it's also their right to determine that. They then made a deal with Google, which I guess is also not abusing a dominant position by Google, as Reddit could have made a deal with anyone.
- Yeah but reddit made a deal with google because google’s the big player.
  
  It’s hard to say, but I’d lead toward Google on this one. How does reddit benefit from only being indexed by one search engine? Google must have offered them something more, to make it in reddit’s best interests.
  
  In other words, this deal naturally benefits only google, at the cost of value to reddit and to the public. So google must be doing something that makes it worth it to reddit. Could be threat of punishment: “You give us exclusive crawl access, or we don’t crawl you”.

Does this mean the Internet Archive will no longer be archiving reddit posts? That's how I've tried viewing most since I deleted my accounts.

I honestly do not think Internet Archive even should be archiving such behemoths like Reddit or Twitter. Only thing it should keep would be currently dead sites.

Even worse when people are accessing these posts through Archive even when there is a live copy. A lot of storage and bandwidth wasted.
- Counterpoint: Scumbag companies ninja-editing their timestamped warranty page such that the only way you know they edited it after you bought the product is because it was archived previously.
  
  Archives are ideal for identifying sneaky behavior like that. You never know when an admin might have the ability to delete or edit something without anyone noticing.
- But imagine this... an immoral rich human being, who's family got rich by mining blood rubies in south Africa, buys reddit for 50B$. This person fires half the people and refuses to pay the bills for servers and the servers shut down... how will you access your favorite GoneWild posts? This is all fictional of course.
- How do you keep a currently dead website you did not previously archive?
- ...but at some point those giant sites may go offline. I see the point of archiving them now for posterity, but you're right. The archive shouldn't be used as a concurrent mirror of those sites for privacy reasons.
  
  I have my browser set up to redirect Reddit links to libreddit instances for that purpose.
We need to do something to protect Internet Archive and its access to scrape sites.

Are we looking at a future where we need a search engine to tell us which search engine to use for your queries?

Oh boy, I can't wait to see what has already happened to streaming services happen to search engines!
I think we’re looking at a future where Google ensures we don’t ever have to worry about making such a choice.
- Microsoft is working very hard at getting into this data game. Don't think they won't try making similar deals.
No, don't worry. The AI will pick one for us.

Reddit search, notorious for being shit, has upgraded to a top tier shit pile.

If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward.

Can anyone confirm this? I typically use DDG, and I tried verifying this, but i'm not sure what to search on reddit that would exclusively bring up results from the past week. Seems like most of the time I'm reading posts from a year ago or more anyway, so it's hard to see the effect immediately.

hello, we're quoted in the piece, set your parameters to look only since the change/recently i.e.

Bing - Restricted to a week here and there is nothing
Mojeek - We are not crawling due to the block, avoiding adding results without content

As most are just using Bing's results (DDG, Qwant, Ecosia) you should see similar.
- aha. yeah that does it. i guess i never used that previously, so i have no comparison point for how well it worked before this deal. But sure enough, i get no results when searching very generic terms and filter to just the last week.
Trump assassination attempt, Biden dropping out of presidential race

Ummmmmmmm. This seems illegal. Is this not illegal?

It's a bit of a dilemma reading their policy:

We believe in the open internet and in keeping Reddit publicly accessible to foster human learning (...) Unfortunately, we see more and more entities using unauthorized access (...) especially with the rise of use cases like generative AI. This sort of misuse of public data has become more prominent as more and more platforms close themselves off from the open internet.
We still believe in an open internet, but we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it’s public.

Being a open/public platform, but still wanting to protect user's content from being used for AI could be a good thing, and I guess also what many fediverse users would want for this platform. Making a distinction between AI and search indexing could indeed be difficult. But then making content deals with Google for search indexing and AI training is a bit hypocrite.

We still believe in an open internet, but we do not believe that third parties have a right to misuse public content just because it’s public.

You need to pay us for the right to misuse our site's data!
I still don’t buy that protecting people’s content from being read by AI is a good thing. I think the fear of AI stealing our thunder or whatever by reading what we’ve written is overblown as a fear.

It's not a big deal... for now, because most of the time when I limit DDG results I ask for 1 year back (for solutions that are sort of recent but not ancient).

I would never limit results to just the last week, and typically posts that are that fresh won't have enough accumulated knowledge so even if they pop up on the results they're not really useful.

Again, that's just my experience. I'm curious if others have similar ones.

In 51 weeks, the decreasing usefulness of that search drops to zero. This is not about now; it's about the future.
- And that comment is not about “what it’s about”. It’s about being curious. It’s incidental to the topic at hand.
True but It will become a bigger deal every passing day that is the problem.

I also wonder if search engine's will delist results after a period of time. If the site is blocking them. After all you don't want your top results to just be 404s all of the time.
- Unless it's 404 Media!