404 Media -“We’ve written a lot over the past year about how bad Google Search is getting, but it’s still incredibly useful for searching Reddit. Add “Reddit” to the end of any search query, and chances are you’ll find a useful thread. Due to a $60 million deal that allows Google to scrape Reddit for AI training data, Google is now the only search engine that will surface new search results from Reddit. This will remain the case until competing search engines pay for similar access, or Reddit changes this new, stricter policy. I hope you read on to find out more about how this happened, and what it means for the future of the web. 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. And while neither Reddit or Google responded to a request for comment, it appears that the exclusion of other search engines is the 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…”

See also The Verge: Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots — except the ones that pay