Like, for example I have a specific issue with a digital audio converter by a popular brand but their customer service is awful. A simple google prompt followed by site:reddit.com would yield solutions almost every time. In fact I would say I did 90% of my googling that way. How do I break this cycle and do you feel this is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing? If anything, Reddit remains the biggest repo of easily accessible solutions for anything. We’re seeing right now what happens if this is being taken away by subs going private. Vanilla Google is a shitshow.
To give a very literal example (which may or may not be ideal but will remove the Reddit links), use
This isn’t answering the actual question, which is how to substitute for the fact that including reddit explicitly was often one of the only ways to get good results. (Especially to get results that aren’t just shitty collated/auto-generated “answer” websites, which are like half of my results sometimes these days)
If you just want to hide Reddit hits, you could use an addon like Hide or Highlight Search Engine Results. I use it to hide results from Pinterest and Elder Scrolls wiki, while highlights those from UESP, for example.
We can use c/techsupport + site:lemmy.world for now