- Google is now the only search engine allowed to index Reddit.
- Reddit is the best source of human-created information on the internet.
- The web could end up divided into silos.
You’re an internet search giant whose search results are worse than ever, and you truly believe that AI is coming to ruin you. What do you do? If you’re Google, the answer is to pay off the biggest source of genuinely useful information on the internet and wall it off for your exclusive use.
Google has done a $60 million deal to license the contents of Reddit’s site to train its AI. That happened back in February of this year. Now, it looks like part of this deal may also give Google exclusive rights to index Reddit for its regular searches, too. Currently, according to investigative journalism site 404 Media, using any non-Google-powered search engine with the “site:reddit.com” modifier returns few or no results. We’re on the way to a fragmented web, which is, ironically, what Google was created to fix in the first place.
“For several reasons, this is an extremely lousy deal for the web. First, it would be an unnatural monopoly over the huge pool of user-generated content. With thousands of topics worth talking about, Reddit has earned the nickname ‘the front page of the internet.’ It holds very useful and helpful discussions, insights, and facts. Converting such a goldmine of data into the preserve of only one search engine goes against the basic premise of free and accessible internet,” Kevin Shahnazari, Tech Lead at Coursera, told Lifewire via email.
Gold Rush
Many people know that just adding the word “reddit” to a web search has long been a way to get more relevant results. That’s because it’s powered by people sharing opinions, fact, data, recommendations, and so on, the best of which are bubbled to the top by Reddit’s voting mechanism. It’s the very opposite of a regular Google search, which prioritizes SEO spam, content farms, ads, and other junk over organic results.
At the same time, Big Tech is in a panic about AI, and they’re burning through both their own money, and our planet’s resources, so they don’t get left behind in what is quite frankly a fruitless gold rush. Google believes that question-answering chatbots will make regular search obsolete, and so it’s doing what any good monopoly would do—locking out the competition.
That’s the state of play, and it’s a very dangerous development for the web as we know it. Ever since the first search engines, the premise has been that you can find anything and everything on the web by searching for it. All search engines had an equal chance because they had equal access to the web. Google initially won by being better than everyone else—faster, with more relevant results, but that was back when Google’s business was search, not advertising.
Now, Google is seeking to shore up its position not by being better but by buying up the best results.
“This is a very typical Google move—a monopoly play that allows them to control more and more of the web. Over 500 million people use Reddit, a vast amount of users, and Google wants to own as much of that as they can,” Julia McCoy, President of Content at Scale, told Lifewire via email.
Silo
The most obvious problem here is that Reddit just sold exclusive use of years and years’ worth of information shared and created by users, none of whom considered that they were working for somebody’s eventual profit. But an even bigger problem is that if this deal sets a precedent, then the web as we know it is over.
Imagine a future where various platforms and sites can only be searched from different search engines. If you use DuckDuckGo, you will never hear about Reddit. Perhaps if you want to search the NYT, you’ll have to do it from Bing. And so on. This fragmentation is clearly bad for users and, ultimately, for publishers.
Only that’s unlikely to happen. The web conglomerates around monolithic platforms, in the same way that space dust ends up as stars, planets, and eventually black holes. It’s just more convenient for users to have to visit one place—YouTube for video, Amazon for shopping, Uber for getting a ride, X for hate speech, etc.
Web monopolies exist in part because we prefer them to the fragmented alternative, and Google may be betting on exactly this. If it can buy up enough of the web’s big sites, then it will stay the de facto default because you won’t be able to search the whole web anywhere else.
There’s one big but here though. Reddit might be off-limits to any other search engines or AI bots, but only if they respect the ban, which is far from certain. Given that every company currently wasting time with AI—Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, and, yes, Google—is scraping the entirety of the web’s data without asking for permission, it doesn’t seem likely that they will exclude Reddit from their trawling.
Like everything with AI right now, it’s a mess, and only time will reveal the answers. Unless AI data centers set the world on fire first, that is.
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- Google's Exclusive Reddit Deal Spells Doom For The Web
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