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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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_...

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.

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.

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.

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.

We do https://www.thecrimson.com/search/

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.

Um. Example of sites where you have to load the whole video? I've never seen that in my life (I'm 29).

I'm only 35 and I remember this. It was quite common before YouTube.

27 and I remember this vaguely.

"It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials)."

It sounds like this is decribing the so-called "moov atom" begin placed at the end of the file.^1

1. https://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/articles/mp4_movie_atom.h...

If not, can anyone provide some examples of these "big sites". Would like to test.

Slack’s search is excellent for me. I use it probably at least once a week to find something important for work. Granted, I’m usually searching for things that I know will be an exact substring match of the message I’m looking for, but for that it works great for me.

As long as we're piling on about search, here are my two least favorite site searches:

   * meetup
   * AWS docs

Going straight to google for both of these nets better results 99% of the time.

It's probably a cycle at this point. More people use google (or other general search), so these sites optimize for them, rather than invest in the site search experience. General search engines are where the users are coming from.

> 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/

There's an independently made Reddit search that is leagues ahead of Reddit's own search:

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

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.

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.

"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.

> "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".

Clever... I might have to steal this one.

Or you can search your topic on Reddit using DDG by “topic !r”

See the grandparent, which rightly asserts that reddit search is bad.

or use !greddit, which searches on google with site:reddit.com added at the end.

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