Plenty Google Search users were appending “site:reddit.com” to their searches to avoid SEO and get actual human answers. This became less useful with the blackouts, and Google is actually addressing it - through a new feature called “Perspectives”. Allegedly the feature highlights forums and videos from social media (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora).
This means that those search users won’t beeline towards Reddit anymore. Instead there’s a reasonable chance that they end in Reddit’s competitors, including Youtube (owned by Alphabet, the same parent company as Google Search).
Given that 47% of the traffic of Reddit comes from organic search, this is going to hurt. A lot.
Depends on the kind of search. If you’re wondering what was newton’s second law, you can just Google that. If you’re having an issue where your steam deck virtual keyboard is not showing up when you press its shortcut, the top 20 non-reddit Google results will all be random SEO articles about the basic features of steam deck.
I tried this one because I know the solutions (either kill the process in the system monitor or restart the device), and I think that I got what I’m doing differently:
I still get some SEO instead of actual results, but the result was comparable with the “site:reddit.com” trick.
I’m actually considering to share this info. It’s helpful for people in general, regardless of reddit going down.