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‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Without google (or any other external search engine) reddit will be a worthless heap. One key feature of reddit was that one could find a lot of good information in relevant subs. A real treasure trove. But you could only find stuff with external engines.
The internal search function was a worthless waste of bits that could not find anything relevant, even if it bit the search function in the a...
Since the API exodus, I've only been using Google to look up something on reddit, strictly using cached versions only (no not give any more traffic to reddit). Whenever I could only find uncached hits, I still did the click of shame.
Thanks reddit, now I can cut the last cord. I couldn't have done it without you.
Yeah my only interaction with reddit now is if I want to read honest discussion of some specific thing without worrying too much if it's astroturfed, I can go to google and search like "wireless earbuds for sleeping reddit". With this change I wouldn't even have that option available, which I consider to be the last thing reddit's good for.
How do you view cached versions only? Is this something I can do with DuckDuckGo too?
Not sure about DuckDuckGo, but for Google you just search something (only desktop version has the option when I do it on mobile), then click the three little dots next to whatever URL you want in the results. It'll pop up a little "more options" window. From there you have to click the little down arrow in the top right of that window and it will reveal a "cached" button to click. There might be an easier way (and it used to not be as "hidden" as it is now beneath the menus) but this is how I know to do it.
I don't think duckduckgo has a cached view (since the results tend to be a mix of the in house crawler and other sources, like bing), but I like cachedview.com for accessing Google's cache (or the archived instance if Google doesn't happen to have it).