Subscribe
Join the newsletter to get the latest updates.
🖥️
404 Media is an independent website whose work is written, reported, and owned by human journalists and whose intended audience is real people, not AI scrapers, bots, or a search algorithm. Sign up to support our work and for free access to this article. Learn why we require this here.
Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine.
If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google.
The news shows how Google’s near monopoly on search is now actively hindering other companies’ ability to compete at a time when Google is facing increasing criticism over the quality of its search results. This exclusion of other search engines also comes after Reddit locked down access to its site to stop companies from scraping it for AI training data, which at the moment only Google can do as a result of a multi-million dollar deal that gives Google the right to scrape Reddit for data to train its AI products.
“They’re [Reddit] killing everything for search but Google,” Colin Hayhurst, CEO of the search engine Mojeek told me on a call.
This post is for paid members only
Become a paid member for unlimited ad-free access to articles, bonus podcast content, and more.
Sign up for free access to this post
Free members get access to posts like this one along with an email round-up of our week's stories.
Already have an account? Sign in