I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.
Many years ago, one of the search options on Google, alongside Images, News, etc., was "Discussions." It would explicitly show results from web forums. I defaulted to this when I was looking for, e.g., product reviews -- because it would bypass the endless SEO spam where someone found some highly-rated products on Amazon and published an article "reviewing" them.
Unfortunately, Google killed that search type. There are some browser extensions and bookmarklets that help, mostly by creating a very complicated search query that looks for specific things in the URL, but the discussion search is something I still mourn.
For what it's worth, my technique these days is to find a forum which has a large amount of discussion, then add a site filter to my Google query and only search that site. For something like product reviews, I can usually find the lesser-known products that don't show up on the SEO lists, at which point I now have a good keyword to find other enthusiast discussions online, which begins to open a lot of doors.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite refined the method for anything other than product reviews. At this point, I've started just using ChatGPT for factual questions before trying Google. :(
Same, if I am done reading reddit discussions I will just switch to 'forum' and occasionally stumble into some forum threads. Most are dead now though!
The Discussions page on google was fantastic. I was able to find information so easily. When they shut it down, there was a firefox extension to bring it back. Until Google shut it down completly. I've always wondered why they did that. Perhaps they wanted to bring attention to bigger websites with adsense? I have no idea.
They apparently[0] have plans to do this for their next "Helpful" content update. And that update should happen soon if we go by the current update metrics[1].
(I also manage sites myself and they've been doing some heavy A/B testing the last couple of weeks, but we have to wait and see how big of an impact it will actually have.)
For people who don't want to click the Twitter link:
> We're also improving how we rank results in Search overall. Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.
I ditched Quora when they had a similar policy change as Reddit, which I disagreed with (honestly, I cannot recall what the kerfuffle was about, but I deleted my Quora account and never went back.) I hate when quora pops up in results.
But google has engineered themselves, deliberately so, into the "black-box behometh in the corner nobody can poke or question, and it just does its damn thing despite any of your riff-raff's ramblings"
They didn't suppress web forums, they instead went to prioritize SEO factors that of course SEO spammers maximized to abuse. Of course the Google solution was to prioritize reddit because people were searching for "<topic> reddit" due to said SEO spam.
I think the primary issue is that no matter what Google prioritizes for, the SEO "blogs" will always switch over to attempting to look like it. Forums, whose goal is just people talking to each other, are never going to end up at the top of the list compared to people actively attempting to game the algorithm. Even if Google started actively promoting things that look like forums, SEO people would just make things that look like forums but are hyper optimized for whatever Google was looking for.
The only way around this is for google to start making a white list of known good forums, but people get (understandably) really pissed when a company of google's size starts actively choosing winners and losers instead of just tuning their algorithm.
bing accounts for your history in promoting search results. and has a different algorithm to google, inevitable really because google's algorithm is secret and unknowable.
the problem is that google WANTs to promote forums because forums are reliable sources of truth, but with automation all they can do is look for subject authority markers (incoming link count, keywords, text references on other highly authoritative pages, etc)
SEO as an industry is about optimizing those markers to appear above "organic" results in a search page.
changing the markers only means the SEO industry will adjust to target the new priorities, but forum operators are always the last to optimize. it's a fundamentally unwinnable game
I posted this a few days ago, and in-line with your thoughts ;
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I use OLD+RES for MY consumption and data density - if you dont know how to configure these together to create a much faster, and more aesthetically pleasing (to me) UX - then that sucks.
