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Recent discussions on Reddit are no longer showing up in non-Google search engine results. The absence is the result of updates to Reddit’s Content Policy that ban crawling its site without agreeing to Reddit’s rules, which bar using Reddit content for AI training without Reddit’s explicit consent.

As reported by 404 Media , using "site:reddit.com" on non-Google search engines, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Mojeek, brings up minimal or no Reddit results from the past week. Ars Technica made searches on these and other search engines and can confirm the findings. Brave, for example, brings up a few Reddit results sometimes (examples here and here ) but not nearly as many as what appears on Google when using identical queries. A standout is Kagi, which is a paid-for engine that pays Google for some of its search index and still shows recent Reddit results.

As 404 Media noted, Reddit's Robots Exclusion Protocol ( robots.txt file ) blocks bots from scraping the site. The protocol also states, "Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content." Reddit has approved scrapers from the Internet Archive and some research-focused entities.

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Last month, we looked into some of the most incorrect, dangerous, and downright weird answers generated by Google's new AI Overviews feature . Since then, Google has offered a partial apology/explanation for generating those kinds of results and has reportedly rolled back the feature's rollout for at least some types of queries.

But the more I've thought about that rollout, the more I've begun to question the wisdom of Google's AI-powered search results in the first place. Even when the system doesn't give obviously wrong results, condensing search results into a neat, compact, AI-generated summary seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the way people use Google in the first place.

Reliability and relevance

When people type a question into the Google search bar, they only sometimes want the kind of basic reference information that can be found on a Wikipedia page or corporate website (or even a Google information snippet ). Often, they're looking for subjective information where there is no one "right" answer: "What are the best Mexican restaurants in Santa Fe?" or "What should I do with my kids on a rainy day?" or "How can I prevent cheese from sliding off my pizza?"

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Bing, Microsoft's search engine platform, went down in the very early morning today . That meant that searches from Microsoft's Edge browsers that had yet to change their default providers didn't work. It also meant that services relying on Bing's search API—Microsoft's own Copilot, ChatGPT search, Yahoo, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo—similarly failed.

Services were largely restored by the morning Eastern work hours, but the timing feels apt, concerning, or some combination of the two. Google, the consistently dominating search platform , just last week announced and debuted AI Overviews as a default addition to all searches . If you don't want an AI response but still want to use Google, you can hunt down the new "Web" option in a menu, or you can, per Ernie Smith , tack "&udm=14" onto your search or use Smith's own "Konami code" shortcut page .

If dismay about AI's hallucinations, power draw, or pizza recipes concern you—along with perhaps broader Google issues involving privacy, tracking, news, SEO, or monopoly power—most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage this morning. Moving past that kind of single point of vulnerability will take some work, both by the industry and by you, the person wondering if there's a real alternative.

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To comply with looming rules that ban tech giants from favoring their own services, Google has been testing new look search results for flights, trains, hotels, restaurants, and products in Europe. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is supposed to help smaller companies get more traffic from Google, but reviews service Yelp says that when it tested Google’s design tweaks with consumers it had the opposite effect—making people less likely to click through to Yelp or another Google competitor.

The results, which Yelp shared with European regulators in December and WIRED this month, put some numerical backing behind complaints from Google rivals in travel, shopping, and hospitality that its efforts to comply with the DMA are insufficient—and potentially more harmful than the status quo. Yelp and thousands of others have been demanding that the EU hold a firm line against the giant companies including Apple and Amazon that are subject to what’s widely considered the world’s strictest antitrust law, violations of which can draw fines of up to 10 percent of global annual sales.

“All the gatekeepers are trying to hold on as long as possible to the status quo and make the new world unattractive,” says Richard Stables, CEO of shopping comparison site Kelkoo, which is unhappy with how Google has tweaked shopping results to comply with the DMA. “That’s really the game plan.”

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Reddit URLs are being manipulated to include a slur in the subdomain, and those URLs are coming up in Google Search results.

The Verge experienced the problem on Tuesday, reporting that while doing a Google search, Reddit results that came up had a URL that looked like this: "https://2goback-[slur].reddit.com/r/[the rest of the URL]".

One Reddit user posted about the problem on Monday , and other Redditors also noticed the issue (examples here and here ).

Enlarge / Apple AI executive and former Google search lead John Giannandrea. (credit: Steve Jennings / TechCrunch / Flickr )

In iOS 17 , Apple recently made it easier to use alternatives to Google search in private browsing mode—but the company considered going even further by making DuckDuckGo, which is marketed as a more private alternative, the default choice in that context.

As reported by Bloomberg's Leah Nylen, the information came to light when Amit Mehta, the US District Judge who is handling the US antitrust trial over Google search, unsealed transcripts of testimonies by DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple SVP of machine learning and AI strategy John Giannandrea. Giannandrea worked as Google's head of search before his current role at Apple .

Weinberg claimed in his testimony that his company had 20 or so meetings with Apple about the possibility and that he believed the change would happen based on prior DuckDuckGo integrations make their way into Safari. He even said this was the one proposed integration that didn't make it "all the way through the finish line."

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A few years before Microsoft went all-in on a ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine , the company had another idea for its perennial, also-ran search engine: sell it to Apple.

A report in Bloomberg , sourced from people familiar with the early theoretical sales talks, states that Microsoft pitched Bing as a way for Apple to replace Google as the default search provider on iPhones, MacBooks, and other devices.

The deal didn't make it past the conversation stage, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft executives approached Eddie Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, who brokered Apple's deal with Google—purportedly worth between $4 and $7 billion in 2020—for Google's long-standing default placement. Google's paid presence on Apple devices has been reviewed in court recently as part of the Department of Justice's antitrust trial over Google's search business.