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I've searched for Reddit in the past because Reddit is the only site where I can get community answers to an important question. In those cases, the community a

I've searched for Reddit in the past because Reddit is the only site where I can get community answers to an important question. In those cases, the community aspect mattered to me - for example, I recently moved to Boston, so I solicited Bostonian's recommendations from r/boston; my partner and I were having troubles, and I wanted to hear from people who'd gone through similar experiences; I wanted to learn about compiler construction and went looking for other smart folks who were interested in the same topic. I would never do a code search on Reddit. I would never search for "restaurants near me" on Reddit. I would almost certainly never solicit medical advice from Reddit, or type in a new term I'd heard to get all the information about it, or try to shop for things from Reddit links. I just don't think that's what Reddit's for. That's why I find both this response and the original so bizarre in their thesis. Search isn't homogeneous, and, while I have noticed declining quality in a few areas I search frequently, those areas almost never overlap with my Reddit-specific search areas. Reddit wouldn't replace my Google any time soon, even if it built a better search engine.

ravenstine 5y ago
Reddit doesn't replace all of search, but for me it does effectively replace search engines when I'm looking for an opinion. Life is short... I don't have time to weigh all the facts about something and make my own decision. While I do that a lot, when getting started with something, an initial opinion to go on is very useful. Search engines have become really bad at surfacing genuine opinions. Crappy GPT-2 generated blogs have overwhelmed the ability of search engines to surface human generated blogs, and even the human ones are often clearly just someone's hour of research on a topic with the conclusion being "decide for yourself". Sites like Quora make it too easy for someone to insert their opinion without it being adequately tested in the public space. YouTube was once a fairly decent place to hear opinions but, like with regular search, it's currently optimized for the equivalent of low-effort blog posts: videos that are ~12 minutes long with little valuable information. Reddit has many issues, but at least it's still a useful place to find opinions that are also openly tested against their respective subcommunities. The usual blog type content doesn't last long in most Reddit communities without becoming substantially downvoted. If I want to know why people are choosing a particular programming language, for instance, I can do `site:reddit.com why use c++` and actually get some concise and even nuanced opinions. An equivalent search across all sites on a search engine usually leads to long treatises with little value appearing first above the fold. If I couldn't use `site:` syntax on DDG or Yandex, I'd probably go directly to Reddit's own search engine a lot of times. So Reddit wouldn't necessarily replace all of my searching, but it definitely would replace a large portion of it. And I wish that wasn't so. I wish more of what appeared in search engine results could either be Reddit-type content or academic articles as opposed to all the flotsam we get that's somewhere in between those two yet fulfilling the needs of few readers. EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason.
- KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
  > EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason. It's because reddit has dedicated communities for so many topics. If you search for something diy related you'll find posts from a specialist sub, and this works even for the most obscure topics.
- oversocialized 5y ago
  imagine using overly censored, social credit priming reddit as your search engine
  - dionian 5y ago
    It's great when you want to search for niche information. Especially because google won't do all its censoring and boosting on the contents as much as it would on a typical google search. That's the point. Neither Google nor Reddit are actively censoring certain types of information. E.g. what is your favorite nail polish or best ice cream in NYC. I think we might agree that if you search for anything politically censored on either, you're going to be led astray.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ksec 5y ago
> the community aspect mattered to me That is why Google was worried about Social Media / Facebook eating them, and hence the creation of Google+. When most of the important, or valuable answer are on the social network, search engine will cease to be the entry point of internet. And in many countries, Facebook and Whatsapp really is "the" Internet. And after that there seems to be a gentleman agreement, Zuckerberg wont enter search. And Google wont enter Social. And actually I use HN for searches as well. From Product recommendation to many other niche subject.
- genewitch 5y ago
  I'm sure this is the reason given as to why facebook's search function is barely better than grep + line noise...
costcofries 5y ago
From the article, "The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue." You know who shares valuable knowledge? Other humans who have personally experienced the knowledge I'm trying to acquire. In this context, Reddit IS the website that shares REAL knowledge. I agree I wouldn't search "restaurants near me" on reddit but what I do search locally, and every single time I visit a new city is, "favorite restaurants in city x". The result is real crowd-voted feedback, from real humans that has almost always been extremely reliable, google doesn't do this, effectively. Another example. I was trying to buy new skis. Google any query and you get SEO'd results which are almost always useless or sponsored reviews/content. Now, try reddit, you get real testimonials from people who have actually used the product and often provide insights I wasn't originally even aware i should be considering. The reddit dataset is already a search engine, it just doesn't have a pretty UI. It's like trying to buy Gucci shoes at Nordstrom Rack vs. the Gucci store.
- shuntress 5y ago
  Google doesn't do this because no one is posting entries like "My trip to X city - Favorite Restaurants" or "Ski Trip - Awesome Demos" on their public personal blogs. There is not enough authentic raw data to work with so google is completely overwhelmed by SEO spam. We get around this by specifically telling Google to prioritize results from Reddit as we "happen to know" that Reddit is a more-or-less reliable public forum where real people share their real opinions. The same thing is already starting to happen though. Astro-turfing and bot spam working to manufacture opinion. Reddit is at least slightly resistant to this due to the nature of the arrangement/management of its communities.
redwall_hp 5y ago
While there's a powerful inclination to take Reddit recommendations, it's also increasingly dangerous. Just from normal usage, it's increasingly apparent that a disturbing proportion of comments are astroturf. There's a flood of accounts that have generic names in the form of word-word-number or word_word_number, usually are only a few days or weeks old with little karma, and run around threads responding to everything until they're banned or cycled out for a new account. This happens not just on political topics, but things related to brands. It's very clear that paid actors are out there attempting to manage public opinion about brands or advertise products. IIRC, part of the original supposition was that produce related search results were flooded with spam sites promoting products...but the bar is far lower to do the same with Reddit accounts. You don't even need an email to create one, let alone a domain name or hosting. There's a very real spam problem, but spam-fighting is stuck in the past.
- quixoticaxolotl 5y ago
  I think this is a really strong second-order point, in that Reddit is vulnerable to comments gamification in the same way Google was to SEO gamification, which sort of defeats the point of this whole enterprise.
dionian 5y ago
Right. I still use google to search reddit. It's that Reddit's content is more directly from people - not marketing departments or SEO optimizers.
Anunayj 5y ago
> try to shop for things from Reddit Any reasons why, I often check reddit for reviews for thing I plan to buy.

ravenstine 5y ago

Reddit doesn't replace all of search, but for me it does effectively replace search engines when I'm looking for an opinion. Life is short... I don't have time to weigh all the facts about something and make my own decision. While I do that a lot, when getting started with something, an initial opinion to go on is very useful. Search engines have become really bad at surfacing genuine opinions. Crappy GPT-2 generated blogs have overwhelmed the ability of search engines to surface human generated blogs, and even the human ones are often clearly just someone's hour of research on a topic with the conclusion being "decide for yourself". Sites like Quora make it too easy for someone to insert their opinion without it being adequately tested in the public space. YouTube was once a fairly decent place to hear opinions but, like with regular search, it's currently optimized for the equivalent of low-effort blog posts: videos that are ~12 minutes long with little valuable information. Reddit has many issues, but at least it's still a useful place to find opinions that are also openly tested against their respective subcommunities. The usual blog type content doesn't last long in most Reddit communities without becoming substantially downvoted. If I want to know why people are choosing a particular programming language, for instance, I can do `site:reddit.com why use c++` and actually get some concise and even nuanced opinions. An equivalent search across all sites on a search engine usually leads to long treatises with little value appearing first above the fold. If I couldn't use `site:` syntax on DDG or Yandex, I'd probably go directly to Reddit's own search engine a lot of times. So Reddit wouldn't necessarily replace all of my searching, but it definitely would replace a large portion of it. And I wish that wasn't so. I wish more of what appeared in search engine results could either be Reddit-type content or academic articles as opposed to all the flotsam we get that's somewhere in between those two yet fulfilling the needs of few readers. EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason.

KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
> EDIT: Somehow I forget how I'll also use HN in a similar way, though less often for some reason. It's because reddit has dedicated communities for so many topics. If you search for something diy related you'll find posts from a specialist sub, and this works even for the most obscure topics.
oversocialized 5y ago
imagine using overly censored, social credit priming reddit as your search engine
- dionian 5y ago
  It's great when you want to search for niche information. Especially because google won't do all its censoring and boosting on the contents as much as it would on a typical google search. That's the point. Neither Google nor Reddit are actively censoring certain types of information. E.g. what is your favorite nail polish or best ice cream in NYC. I think we might agree that if you search for anything politically censored on either, you're going to be led astray.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ksec 5y ago

> the community aspect mattered to me That is why Google was worried about Social Media / Facebook eating them, and hence the creation of Google+. When most of the important, or valuable answer are on the social network, search engine will cease to be the entry point of internet. And in many countries, Facebook and Whatsapp really is "the" Internet. And after that there seems to be a gentleman agreement, Zuckerberg wont enter search. And Google wont enter Social. And actually I use HN for searches as well. From Product recommendation to many other niche subject.

genewitch 5y ago
I'm sure this is the reason given as to why facebook's search function is barely better than grep + line noise...

costcofries 5y ago

From the article, "The best way to fix the system is to prioritize websites that are there to share knowledge, not websites with their primary priority to make ad revenue." You know who shares valuable knowledge? Other humans who have personally experienced the knowledge I'm trying to acquire. In this context, Reddit IS the website that shares REAL knowledge. I agree I wouldn't search "restaurants near me" on reddit but what I do search locally, and every single time I visit a new city is, "favorite restaurants in city x". The result is real crowd-voted feedback, from real humans that has almost always been extremely reliable, google doesn't do this, effectively. Another example. I was trying to buy new skis. Google any query and you get SEO'd results which are almost always useless or sponsored reviews/content. Now, try reddit, you get real testimonials from people who have actually used the product and often provide insights I wasn't originally even aware i should be considering. The reddit dataset is already a search engine, it just doesn't have a pretty UI. It's like trying to buy Gucci shoes at Nordstrom Rack vs. the Gucci store.

shuntress 5y ago
Google doesn't do this because no one is posting entries like "My trip to X city - Favorite Restaurants" or "Ski Trip - Awesome Demos" on their public personal blogs. There is not enough authentic raw data to work with so google is completely overwhelmed by SEO spam. We get around this by specifically telling Google to prioritize results from Reddit as we "happen to know" that Reddit is a more-or-less reliable public forum where real people share their real opinions. The same thing is already starting to happen though. Astro-turfing and bot spam working to manufacture opinion. Reddit is at least slightly resistant to this due to the nature of the arrangement/management of its communities.

redwall_hp 5y ago

While there's a powerful inclination to take Reddit recommendations, it's also increasingly dangerous. Just from normal usage, it's increasingly apparent that a disturbing proportion of comments are astroturf. There's a flood of accounts that have generic names in the form of word-word-number or word_word_number, usually are only a few days or weeks old with little karma, and run around threads responding to everything until they're banned or cycled out for a new account. This happens not just on political topics, but things related to brands. It's very clear that paid actors are out there attempting to manage public opinion about brands or advertise products. IIRC, part of the original supposition was that produce related search results were flooded with spam sites promoting products...but the bar is far lower to do the same with Reddit accounts. You don't even need an email to create one, let alone a domain name or hosting. There's a very real spam problem, but spam-fighting is stuck in the past.

quixoticaxolotl 5y ago
I think this is a really strong second-order point, in that Reddit is vulnerable to comments gamification in the same way Google was to SEO gamification, which sort of defeats the point of this whole enterprise.

dionian 5y ago

Right. I still use google to search reddit. It's that Reddit's content is more directly from people - not marketing departments or SEO optimizers.

Anunayj 5y ago

> try to shop for things from Reddit Any reasons why, I often check reddit for reviews for thing I plan to buy.