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> I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+

> I guess what I'm try to say is nothing will beat simply Google searching a topic and typing "reddit" afterwards to query some super insightful and awesome 5+ year old forum post on whatever the content is. Better yet, use site:reddit.com Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. > There was a golden era of reddit right before the great Digg migration. Excellent comments, diverse opinions, and really great back and forth being shared of individual's experiences in almost every single subreddit. That golden era is still happening. It's just hidden under a bunch of signal noise. It helps to take all of the popular subreddits out of your feed and only join more niche ones. The reality is that humanity in general is experiencing the same "golden era" hidden behind a high noise to signal ratio. There's only so much we can do to filter through it.

stingraycharles 5y ago
> Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason. Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_reddit_have_such_poor_search_and_sort/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_...
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I haven't seen a single social media or messaging platform where search didn't suck. Reddit search was bad, after redesign it's just hot garbage. Messenger search is unreliable and near-useless. Facebook search only worked well for the brief moment when they introduced "graph search", but that got quickly killed due to popular outrage. HN's bolted-on Algolia search is the least bad I've seen. And let's not even talk about Twitter, Instagram or Slack. I'd go as far as saying that search features are being underdeveloped on purpose - perhaps they allow usage patterns that service owners don't like. But then, Mastodon's search is even worse than Twitter, and that project has no incentive to disenfranchise their users. So I'm honestly confused about all this.
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    I think it’s a combination of “search is hard” and “witty comments / titles make it even harder to search for”. I’d argue most of these sites would be far better off with just using Algolia or Google as their main search engine and calling it a day.
    - whatyesaid 5y ago
      It's not some impossible problem with their resources. I think it's moreso the case that they prioritize newer (but less relevant) stuff you can still engage/social-mediaize with than the actual query even if you don't use the new filter.
    - derefr 5y ago
      Google even has a Custom Search API that allows a site's backend to treat Google Search as (essentially) its own search cluster, ala ElasticSearch. Oddly, I've never heard of any actually using this API. Sites that integrate with Google only ever seem to do so by having their search box bounce you to a Google Search page.
      - obventio56 5y ago
        We do https://www.thecrimson.com/search/ https://www.thecrimson.com/search/
  - tsian2 5y ago
    This lead me to believe that search must really hard to implement, but then a few days of getting into Sphinx convinced me otherwise. It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials). They could do better, they just don't.
    - medstrom 5y ago
      Um. Example of sites where you have to load the whole video? I've never seen that in my life (I'm 29).
- lacksconfidence 5y ago
  > I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason. They have recently invested in it, switching to lucidworks[1] a few years ago. Sadly i don't think it changed anyones opinion of reddit search, but it might have saved them some infrastructure cost. [1] https://lucidworks.com/customers/reddit/ https://lucidworks.com/customers/reddit/
- tornato7 5y ago
  There's an independently made Reddit search that is leagues ahead of Reddit's own search: https://redditsearch.io/ https://redditsearch.io/ It's made by the guy who runs pushshift.io - he does an incredible public service by archiving terabytes of social media data into a fully searchable ElasticSearch cluster. Plug for his Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pushshift https://www.patreon.com/pushshift
  - abhijat 5y ago
    I think pushshift is what powers all the reddit undelete websites, because it doesn't register post or comment deletes. So for a true, unrecoverable delete you have to edit your post to empty body or something nonsensical, and then delete it.
wfawejoiweoif 5y ago
"site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards. I use DDG, which simply doesn't handle just putting "reddit" at the end of things very well compared to google, and no mobile keyboard makes typing "site:reddit.com" easy given the punctuation and the auto-inserted spaces, so I typically just end up doing "reddit g!" to deal with it and just use google.
- layer8 5y ago
  > "site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards. On iOS I use Text Replacement to replace (e.g.) "sr" by "site:reddit.com".
  - throaway46546 5y ago
    Clever... I might have to steal this one.
- zikduruqe 5y ago
  Or you can search your topic on Reddit using DDG by “topic !r”
  - windowojji 5y ago
    See the grandparent, which rightly asserts that reddit search is bad.
- slazaro 5y ago
  or use !greddit, which searches on google with site:reddit.com added at the end.
epa 5y ago
In the past it used to be the Google "discussions" search which would bring up the same content except across all the unique niche vbulletin forums that existed. Once bots started gaming those for SEO it was sadly removed from Google.

stingraycharles 5y ago

> Reddit's search really needs some work. It's practically useless for me unless I am using old.reddit.com/. I always thought that “Reddit search is bad” is pretty much as old as Reddit itself. I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason. Here’s a post from 8y ago where people were already accepting that it has been like that forever, and it hasn’t changed a lot ever since. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_reddit_have_such_poor_search_and_sort/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/146gop/why_does_...

TeMPOraL 5y ago
I haven't seen a single social media or messaging platform where search didn't suck. Reddit search was bad, after redesign it's just hot garbage. Messenger search is unreliable and near-useless. Facebook search only worked well for the brief moment when they introduced "graph search", but that got quickly killed due to popular outrage. HN's bolted-on Algolia search is the least bad I've seen. And let's not even talk about Twitter, Instagram or Slack. I'd go as far as saying that search features are being underdeveloped on purpose - perhaps they allow usage patterns that service owners don't like. But then, Mastodon's search is even worse than Twitter, and that project has no incentive to disenfranchise their users. So I'm honestly confused about all this.
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  I think it’s a combination of “search is hard” and “witty comments / titles make it even harder to search for”. I’d argue most of these sites would be far better off with just using Algolia or Google as their main search engine and calling it a day.
  - whatyesaid 5y ago
    It's not some impossible problem with their resources. I think it's moreso the case that they prioritize newer (but less relevant) stuff you can still engage/social-mediaize with than the actual query even if you don't use the new filter.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Google even has a Custom Search API that allows a site's backend to treat Google Search as (essentially) its own search cluster, ala ElasticSearch. Oddly, I've never heard of any actually using this API. Sites that integrate with Google only ever seem to do so by having their search box bounce you to a Google Search page.
    - obventio56 5y ago
      We do https://www.thecrimson.com/search/ https://www.thecrimson.com/search/
- tsian2 5y ago
  This lead me to believe that search must really hard to implement, but then a few days of getting into Sphinx convinced me otherwise. It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials). They could do better, they just don't.
  - medstrom 5y ago
    Um. Example of sites where you have to load the whole video? I've never seen that in my life (I'm 29).
lacksconfidence 5y ago
> I don’t think they ever seriously invested in that, for whatever reason. They have recently invested in it, switching to lucidworks[1] a few years ago. Sadly i don't think it changed anyones opinion of reddit search, but it might have saved them some infrastructure cost. [1] https://lucidworks.com/customers/reddit/ https://lucidworks.com/customers/reddit/
tornato7 5y ago
There's an independently made Reddit search that is leagues ahead of Reddit's own search: https://redditsearch.io/ https://redditsearch.io/ It's made by the guy who runs pushshift.io - he does an incredible public service by archiving terabytes of social media data into a fully searchable ElasticSearch cluster. Plug for his Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pushshift https://www.patreon.com/pushshift
- abhijat 5y ago
  I think pushshift is what powers all the reddit undelete websites, because it doesn't register post or comment deletes. So for a true, unrecoverable delete you have to edit your post to empty body or something nonsensical, and then delete it.

wfawejoiweoif 5y ago

"site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards. I use DDG, which simply doesn't handle just putting "reddit" at the end of things very well compared to google, and no mobile keyboard makes typing "site:reddit.com" easy given the punctuation and the auto-inserted spaces, so I typically just end up doing "reddit g!" to deal with it and just use google.

layer8 5y ago
> "site:reddit.com" is significantly more burdensome to type than "reddit", particularly on phone keyboards. On iOS I use Text Replacement to replace (e.g.) "sr" by "site:reddit.com".
- throaway46546 5y ago
  Clever... I might have to steal this one.
zikduruqe 5y ago
Or you can search your topic on Reddit using DDG by “topic !r”
- windowojji 5y ago
  See the grandparent, which rightly asserts that reddit search is bad.
slazaro 5y ago
or use !greddit, which searches on google with site:reddit.com added at the end.

epa 5y ago

In the past it used to be the Google "discussions" search which would bring up the same content except across all the unique niche vbulletin forums that existed. Once bots started gaming those for SEO it was sadly removed from Google.