>the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content.
I think it's 100% this. But, maybe worse. While Google is claiming they are simply giving users what they want (e.g. observing that users were adding reddit to search terms), I believe they were also getting their asses handed to them by SEO spam / gaming and their search quality nose-dived. In the last year or so I have noticed a very sharp degradation in quality, including non-user language obvious content spam taking top results.
It's almost like their algo was finally broken for good and they had no response or didn't want to invest in the continued SEO cat-and-mouse while they pivot their search to AI.
So, hardcoding to Reddit et. al. was the quick fix.
>Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation
But, it does seem that at one time it was much better, and reliably provided reasonably useful results to non-explictly moderated results.
I think it's 100% this. But, maybe worse. While Google is claiming they are simply giving users what they want (e.g. observing that users were adding reddit to search terms), I believe they were also getting their asses handed to them by SEO spam / gaming and their search quality nose-dived. In the last year or so I have noticed a very sharp degradation in quality, including non-user language obvious content spam taking top results.
It's almost like their algo was finally broken for good and they had no response or didn't want to invest in the continued SEO cat-and-mouse while they pivot their search to AI.
So, hardcoding to Reddit et. al. was the quick fix.
>Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation
But, it does seem that at one time it was much better, and reliably provided reasonably useful results to non-explictly moderated results.