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Google has admitted that the blackout protest by thousands of subreddits earlier this month had a negative effect on user experience. The search results yielded generic outcomes, often boosted by SEO algorithms which did not answer a user's query adequately. 

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According to a CNBC report, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that despite making new changes, the search results were not as comprehensive as Reddit search results during the blackout. 

“Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that’s iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy,” Raghavan said. “We need to make users happy.”

Raghavan was responding to an employee's comment about negative user feedback. “What can we do to improve the user experience on the core product that made Google a household name,” the employee asked. 

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While Google yielded exhaustive search results in its initial years, lately it has been offering robotic responses that do little to answer the query. As a result, most Google users employ adding 'Reddit' to any query to receive better results which an ordinary Google search is not able to provide. However, since major subreddits had gone dark (private or closed), as a sign of protests, the queries lost relevance and returned empty results. 

Also read | Explained: Why are thousands of subreddits going dark on Reddit?

Why did the subreddits go dark?

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The blackout decision was taken by moderators after Reddit announced plans of charging developers, for access to its API (Application Programming Interface), starting July 1. The changes clocked in will introduce hefty charges for "premium access" to Reddit's data which will effectively kill third-party apps such as Apollo, Narwhal, Relay, and Infinity.

The aforementioned apps would have to fork out as much as $5 per user each month simply to pay the new fees to Reddit, according to Christian Selig, Apollo's sole developer. At their current rate of API usage, the ballpark annual figure would be more than $20 million. 

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What is Reddit saying?

Reddit has claimed that it needs to be paid adequately for the millions it spends on operating the platform. It adds that the knowledge the platform has amassed over the years is too prized to give away for free.  

“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation. There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all. But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free,” Reddit’s CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman said in an interview with the New York Times. 

(With inputs from agencies)

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