“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?”
Are we looking at a future where we need a search engine to tell us which search engine to use for your queries?
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.
I don’t have a ton of knowledge in this area, but this seems like it should run afoul of antitrust regulations?
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.
He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.
“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”
Oh yeah you’re right we should just not even bother voting and let the right wing win.
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”.
In 2023, Reddit decided to start charging exorbitant amounts for API access, making it non-viable for free 3rd party apps to access its content, citing things like AI crawlers “stealing” their (users’) content.
In 2024, Google announced an agreement with Reddit to access the API, citing things like enhanced up to date search results. I don’t recall having seen whether they pay for it, or how much, but possibly they do.
It would stand to reason, that if Reddit has managed to get a single dime for API access, and they keep thinking free access to their users’ content is “stealing”, then Reddit would be interested in making it as hard as possible to access the content without paying.
Could be threat of punishment: “You give us exclusive crawl access, or we don’t crawl you”.
That could’ve been part of the agreement: “You give us cheap/free API access, or we don’t crawl you”.
Reddit tightening things down while trying to sell API access, just happens to benefit Google.
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.
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.
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.
