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Comment by ahtihn | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why search is something that Reddit needs to have. Google does the job perfectly fine. Search isn't a core feature for Reddit and it's certainly not "basic" functionality.

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Google does an okay job and certainly is the best option for searching Reddit that I'm aware of, but there are many cases where Google breaks (largely due to Reddit's site). It's common to get results that don't match anything in the content itself, but matches a title in the "more from this subreddit" section at the time Google scraped it. Dates are often wrong so adding date filters often doesn't work as expected.

Even old Reddit has the "more from this subreddit" type links now so I imagine it breaks even if you scope your query to the old domain. I noticed most of this appeared after they launched the new Reddit UI, I don't remember having this problem in the past. Note that these are problems they could likely fix so I agree, but any platform can likely build a more context aware search as well.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but don't work on search, opinions are my own, blah blah

Yeah, the broken date range search drives me nuts. "Oh, there's a month old reddit post about what I'm searching for... nvm, it's 4 years old."

I’ve always assumed Reddit is lying about dates on purpose for SEO reasons

How can you search specific comments in a single Reddit post with Google accurately?

Take a recent Reddit post and try on Google:

site:https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/u3vzo2/russia_wa... arms

Even subreddit comment search on Google is flimsy due to Reddit not properly exposing the dates, so Google's indexed dates are usually wrong.

yes, hit or miss on comments; appears Google indexed that post ~15 hours ago

does work properly for those comments did index, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=%22Putin+is+in+no+shape%22+site%3A...

I find this hit or miss - often Google gets it right and often it does not. Definitely would be nice if they were able to fix this!

People have complained about the poor quality of Reddit search for as long as it has existed.

Aside from that, certainly, a site with its own indexing and awareness of its own internal structure can provide a better search experience than a third-party.

> I don't understand why search is something that Reddit needs to have. Google does the job perfectly fine.

No, it absolutely does not. I have used Google to search Reddit for a string and got no results. That string was present in a Reddit comment open in another tab. It was a few years old so there is very little chance it hadn't been indexed yet.

Good search is really a must for any forum though - I remember back in the day when more forums were independent (pre Reddit) and less moderated a common thing to tell a new user that made a very common (repeated) post was to use the search function. Some people were dicks about it but often people just were gently steering the person in the right direction. No need to have the same exact post every week clogging things up when a simple search can lead you to high quality discussion content on the same exact topic.

But then Reddit doesn’t get to collect all the search data. I would imagine knowing what people are actually looking for is quite valuable

Increasing impressions/time-on-site increases ad inventory and also juices all the other engagement numbers.

This is a good move by Reddit (whose search has always been abominable). Many HN'ers have pointed out that they add "reddit" to their Google searches, ex: "<product X> reviews reddit". Why let Google get the ad dollars for that SERP?

Maybe they set it up to be more easily crawlable by AI bots internal to reddit to begin developing a sale-able data pack on the profiles of its users?

because reddit is a for-profit business and if it can wrestle search from Google obviously it will. In a broader sense the internet is moving away from its protocol nature to vertically integrated firms and you can expect this fragmentation of search in many places.

site:www.reddit.com/r/whatever_subreddit "whatever you are searching for"

Works for me every time. I haven't used Reddit search in 10 years.

I'm at a loss for why anyone would want to read Reddit comments in the first place though. At least on one of the top 100 subs.

Even for private subreddits? Severe doubt.

That isn’t a problem faced by the vast majority of Reddit users. What I posted is a workaround that has been available since Reddit was founded and would be useful for the average user to know.

Subs like AskReddit literally are their comments. That's why you read them.

Comments are literally the whole point of forums - what the point be if people did NOT want to read the comments?

I agree there are a lot of crap comments on the bigger default subs (as is the same with any forum) but those are relatively easy to ignore and recognize with experience. Or maybe I just have been using internet forums for too long !

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