In its continuous efforts to revolutionize search results, Google recently introduced Search Generative Experience (SGE), an AI-powered feature with ambitions of transforming everyday queries. While the technology shows promise, early testers have found that it falls short of a well-known search trick: adding “reddit” to the end of queries. Instead of directing readers to sites targeting SEO traffic, this straightforward technique draws on the knowledge of Reddit’s community to provide actual help from forum discussions. Despite Google’s machine learning advancements, this search trick’s popularity highlights the tremendous difficulty in providing helpful search experiences with AI.
In case you haven’t heard, thousands of subreddits recently went dark in protest against Reddit’s management decisions, causing a noticeable impact on search results. As part of a global protest over Reddit’s proposal to charge developers for access to its data, a potential death blow to third-party Reddit clients, moderators of well-known forums turned their pages private. Inadvertently, the widely used search tactic of adding “reddit” to search queries became obsolete, as pages stopped working or became useless, emphasizing how much Google users rely on Reddit’s user-generated content.
Google executives have heard the dissatisfaction expressed by users following the recent Reddit blackout, according to CNBC. Google’s head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, openly acknowledged during a staff meeting that users are “not entirely happy” with the search process. Raghavan underscored the company’s dedication to improving search results by offering more genuine responses, stating “We need to make users happy.”
To that end, Google recently unveiled a new feature called Perspectives, which aims to surface discussion forums and videos from various social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Quora. While it doesn’t help much for AI responses yet, SGE could eventually be trained to pull information from Perspectives to serve up more complete answers.
Google hopes Perspectives will provide users with alternative sources of authentic information, acknowledging the valuable contributions of platforms like Reddit. Users can access content published by posters on discussion boards, Q&A websites, and social media platforms by using the Viewpoints filter in search results, and these can be further parsed by content type. Google also offers more details about the content producers, such as their names, profile pictures, and their popularity.
While Perspectives are still in the process of rolling out, you can already sign up to test Search Generative Experience through Google Search Labs. With any luck, these two features will develop some synergy, and we’ll finally be able to stop tacking “reddit” onto the ends of searches.