Back in January, I wrote about a Twitter thread concerning poor Google search results. The complaint was almost all the results were ads. DKB has a new post that covers the same ground. He says that Google is dying and reddit is now the search engine that everyone uses.
Neither of those two claims seems valid. After all, no one thinks that Google, who just had record profits, is literally dying. And how would you even use reddit as a search engine? DKB provides the needed context in his post. What is actually dying is the quality of Google search results in certain categories. Those categories are precisely the ones that attract advertisers. If you ask Google who the 32nd President of United States was, you get a accurate answer and probably little advertising. If, on the other hand, you search for a review of a particular late model car, your results are apt to be mostly ads and SEO engineered content.
That’s where reddit comes in. If you ask reddit about that same car, you’re going to hear from real people who doubtless have strong views but not a vested interest in getting you buy one. So DKB’s claim that reddit is the “most used” search engine should be understood to mean that people are now appending “reddit” to their searches as a way of finding out what reddit has to say on subjects whose results are abused by ads and SEO.
Take a look at the post to see the whole argument. You may or may not agree but it’s one more indication that Google is failing in their primary business.