Google’s Reddit monopoly sparks concerns for alternative search engines
Not only does this stifle competition, but it also limits users to a one-size-fits-all search experience.
JoriPress
- Google is currently the only search engine that’s able to crawl Reddit and display recent search results from the platform.
- This further cements the company’s position as the dominant search engine and makes it harder for people using alternative platforms to access a good amount of user-generated content.
- This has once again sparked concerns about Google’s monopolistic practices.
Earlier this year, Google entered into an exclusive deal with Reddit to use its user-generated content for training the company’s AI apps. Fast forward to today, and the Mountain View tech giant is the sole search engine that’s able to display recent search results from Reddit. Now, this has, undoubtedly, made Google’s platform all the more capable. But what does this mean for you if you use one of the many alternative search engines, like DuckDuckGo or Bing?
Well, in a nutshell, it means searching for Reddit content using “site:reddit.com” will no longer yield results on these alternative platforms (via 404 Media). The reporting outlet found that DuckDuckGo is turning up a handful of Reddit search results for now, but there’s no further data on where the links go. Older Reddit links, from prior to last week, that is, still come up, but because alternative search engines are unable to crawl Reddit anymore, Google is your best bet for finding the most recent Reddit content.
