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The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic. Because Reddit has horrible search

by rifty 2y ago

The relationship between Google and Reddit goes beyond just improving normal web search for Google - it's actually symbiotic. Because Reddit has horrible search, the best way to search Reddit content is actually using Google's indexing instead. Every time the Google algorithm feeds Reddit, it's feeding itself with more '...reddit' queries. Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too different to the role curated directories used to play in sorting and filtering the web ecosystem for Google when it’s algorithm was considered good. So while there is a lot of user generated content, i feel the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content. So my theory follows: the Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation. The Google algorithm only works well when Reddit is applied to it, because Google supplanted, or ignores the other places it happens on the web. Or worse, they've promoted and paid attention to unauthentic content curation through their SEO and 'trusted' sources initiatives.

bogtog 2y ago
> Because Reddit has horrible search Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.
  - Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    "Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.
  - icdtea 2y ago
    Search the same thing rephrased slightly differently 5 times to find the right result, and I can show you 5 sets of ads related closely to the topic of your search.
  - kevincox 2y ago
    Off the top if my head I can think of two reasons. 1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search. 2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Because you can't implement that with efficient data structures like posting lists.
- rifty 2y ago
  Perhaps a bit hyperbolic on my part, it is fine, but it’s poor for the velocity of content it produces. Up until 2 years ago it lacked comment search… [1] which afaik can only search only so far back as well. It also doesn’t search it’s full corpus. There are third party tools which which allow for search a specific time period for this reason [2]. Although google works better here too. With better listing. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_with_reddit_search_episode_vi_retrieve/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_wit... 2. https://www.redditsearchtool.com https://www.redditsearchtool.com
- asdff 2y ago
  Google does a better job of taking your exact search and returning fuzzy results that are pretty relevant (usually extremely relevant), whereas reddit search just pulls up results that have your terms in them as they are written. Google might also do some ranking based on other users searching for similar things, while afaik reddit is pretty "dumb" search.
- brookst 2y ago
  Reddit search is good if you know what you're looking for -- specific words, preferably a time period. It is terrible as a semantic search. If you go to r/travel and search for "France", it will not turn up posts about Paris unless the post specifically includes "france".
unclebucknasty 2y ago
>the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content. I think it's 100% this. But, maybe worse. While Google is claiming they are simply giving users what they want (e.g. observing that users were adding reddit to search terms), I believe they were also getting their asses handed to them by SEO spam / gaming and their search quality nose-dived. In the last year or so I have noticed a very sharp degradation in quality, including non-user language obvious content spam taking top results. It's almost like their algo was finally broken for good and they had no response or didn't want to invest in the continued SEO cat-and-mouse while they pivot their search to AI. So, hardcoding to Reddit et. al. was the quick fix. >Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation But, it does seem that at one time it was much better, and reliably provided reasonably useful results to non-explictly moderated results.

by rifty 2y ago

bogtog 2y ago

> Because Reddit has horrible search Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?

zelphirkalt 2y ago
One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  "Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.
- icdtea 2y ago
  Search the same thing rephrased slightly differently 5 times to find the right result, and I can show you 5 sets of ads related closely to the topic of your search.
- kevincox 2y ago
  Off the top if my head I can think of two reasons. 1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search. 2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Because you can't implement that with efficient data structures like posting lists.
rifty 2y ago
Perhaps a bit hyperbolic on my part, it is fine, but it’s poor for the velocity of content it produces. Up until 2 years ago it lacked comment search… [1] which afaik can only search only so far back as well. It also doesn’t search it’s full corpus. There are third party tools which which allow for search a specific time period for this reason [2]. Although google works better here too. With better listing. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_with_reddit_search_episode_vi_retrieve/ https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_wit... 2. https://www.redditsearchtool.com https://www.redditsearchtool.com
asdff 2y ago
Google does a better job of taking your exact search and returning fuzzy results that are pretty relevant (usually extremely relevant), whereas reddit search just pulls up results that have your terms in them as they are written. Google might also do some ranking based on other users searching for similar things, while afaik reddit is pretty "dumb" search.
brookst 2y ago
Reddit search is good if you know what you're looking for -- specific words, preferably a time period. It is terrible as a semantic search. If you go to r/travel and search for "France", it will not turn up posts about Paris unless the post specifically includes "france".

unclebucknasty 2y ago

>the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content. I think it's 100% this. But, maybe worse. While Google is claiming they are simply giving users what they want (e.g. observing that users were adding reddit to search terms), I believe they were also getting their asses handed to them by SEO spam / gaming and their search quality nose-dived. In the last year or so I have noticed a very sharp degradation in quality, including non-user language obvious content spam taking top results. It's almost like their algo was finally broken for good and they had no response or didn't want to invest in the continued SEO cat-and-mouse while they pivot their search to AI. So, hardcoding to Reddit et. al. was the quick fix. >Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation But, it does seem that at one time it was much better, and reliably provided reasonably useful results to non-explictly moderated results.