Append Reddit – Chrome extension that redoes searches with Reddit appended | Hacker News Reader

Append Reddit – Chrome extension that redoes searches with Reddit appended

chrome.google.com

80 pointsamitlevy4989 comments

Or you could just add this to your chrome search engines and set the shortcut to r. Now you don't even have to press control.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s

The same works with Brave too! D'uh!

Should work for any Chromium-based browser, such as Edge, Vivaldi or Opera.

One of the few good things that comes from homogenizing browsers under one engine: they all pretty much work the same.

You can achieve the same result on Firefox without any extention (and maybe Chrome too). To do so have use "Custom Keywords"[0], which kind of allow you to change the behaviour of your search bar. For example, one of my keywords is "rd", and typing "rd my search" in my search bar launch a search on Google with "my search site:reddit.com".

I've seen people doing really cool things using these custom keywords and JS, I don't know if it is very practical but the possibilities are endless.

[0] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html

I use this extensively on FF desktop but sadly, I don't think I it's available on FF mobile. Has anyone had any luck finding a solution on mobile without needing to type in the extra ~15 character suffix?

On iOS I use Settings –> General –> Keyboards –> Text Replacement to define a replacement “sr” –> “site:reddit.com”. There’s probably some equivalent on Android.

Chrome can do the same via search engine shortcuts. This actually should be considered a basic browser feature, and as far as I can tell virtually every desktop browser since IE3 in 1996 does have it built in, it’s just not very well known.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Such shortcuts (aka Site Search in Chrome) are a longstanding feature in Chrome, and it's unclear why you might need or want to do with a browser plugin instead.

What I'd really like to see is some way to important some giant list of them, like duckduckgos list of bangs.

Reddit search is terrible, so you use Google to search Reddit. Google search is terrible for product reviews, so you use it to get to back to Reddit.

You can just combine the two, without the need of an extension - use Google to search within Reddit.

Say you want to search Reddit for pancakes - your Google search would be

pancakes site:reddit.com

And Google will return the matches it found on reddit.com. Alas in what I've used it, it won't work with subreddits (like doing "pancakes site:reddit.com/r/pancakes")

> Alas in what I've used it, it won't work with subreddits (like doing "pancakes site:reddit.com/r/pancakes")

I use that quite often to restrict to a subreddit and it works well in my experience.

same, never had any problems adding subreddits to site: searches

Can also search like this:

   pancakes site:reddit.com intitle:"/r/memes"

Will show results for pancakes from Reddit, from the memes subreddit.

You can also include the subreddit in the site operator for the more lazy of us i.e.

pancakes site:reddit.com/r/memes

Can't force it to return the old.reddit.com versions, unfortunately.

You just need a redirect rule to do it, right?

You could also just do:

> pancakes site:reddit.com/r/memes

For more complex queries, you can use https://github.com/pushshift/api.

What's the point? Product reviews are all gamed. Having been burned several times trying to use "reviews," and buying "the good stuff," only to have it break within a couple years, has soured me on any and all review systems or services (especially Consumer Reports), and convinced me that they only way to get REAL quality is to spend 2x-5x as much for something as the mainstream leader in the category. I believe that nothing you find at Reddit is in any way indicative of an honest review, but, hey, YMMV, TACMA, IANAL, etc., et. al.

Take the commentary on Reddit with a grain of skepticism and an understanding that people are speaking from a personal point of view, not an expert point of view. I treat the information I find via Reddit as a strong data point, but not the end of the search.

Right, the information on Reddit is more likely (but not guaranteed) to be authentic, not necessarily more likely to be correct.

As well, authenticity can be investigated more than in reviews. If the person has a bunch of genuine seeming posts in other categories the risk of not being authentic is acceptably low for me (might seem like a bit much, but be burned by obscured ads enough times...)

If a tweet gets shared enough, its author gets approached by brands who want to pay them to add ads below the tweet. The same probably happens on Reddit, except it's even easier, because anyone can write a review, since the author of a popular post doesn't have a visibility advantage when posting a reply to it.

Just find some random users, and offer to pay them for a good recommendation on some "what is the best product to do X?" post.

When the results degrade, I'll stop using this approach. This feels like an "argument from cynicism" given that there's a widespread feel this gives better results (and intuitively, this feels like microbartering and more as likely to get a reddit post about the phenomenon as acceptance, no not everyone will accept random $100 solicitations, and they're not influential enough for more)

Also the accuracy of Reddit date ranges as listed in Google search is broken then works then it's broken again so you just hope for the best on any given day. Seems to be working at the moment.

Don't have to use Google. Duckduckgo or any other search engine is suffice.

I think it's only a matter of time before this becomes kinda mainstream, and reddit too will be 'optimized' like google.

It's already happening - marketers are creating sockpuppet accounts on Reddit to promote their products. This approach isn't sustainable.

Do you have any examples of what this looks like?

It's fairly well-known that some accounts "karma farm" by posting comment designed to be upvoted, and then use the credibility to sell themselves to marketers. Also, I believe it's fairly straightforward to buy votes in your posts from sock puppet farms.

Here's an old post from a security researcher that wrote papers on this topic, and also experimented with buying votes:

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...

I am unsure what the current field is like.

If you moderate large enough subs you see this just often enough. They'll find another sub to farm karma on, then come to yours to spam their random new domain. I wish reddit automod could check the age of the domain since it was registered, could help, although it could also be straining on reddits part, but I've seen some weirdo who gets a new domain and spams blogspam thats just ripped off articles with ads all over. I'm surprised they're turning a profit wasting money on so many domains.

Before ever being a submod anywhere, I had no idea of half of what goes on in reddit.

r/oilpen is mostly Yocan bots, any hearing aid related subreddit etc

This person drives in a small car in other drivers' blind spots, waits for them to try to merge in front of them, then uses a novelty car horn.

Then they upload the video, which Reddit loves because it is watching someone else possibly make an error thereby making the viewer feel better about themselves, and then they get an opportunity to share a link for the horn in the comments when people (or maybe the original poster’s alternative accounts) inevitably ask where they can also get a horn like it:

https://www.reddit.com/user/Muscles_Metal_Miata/

I do not see what other explanation there could be for why a person is recording and uploading so many incidents of the same type within such a short timespan.

That sort of incident happens every day in the Bay Area, but people just yield or pre-emptively make room when they see the other guy is going to do this. This guy has decided not to and so he's got a lot of videos. That's literally it. If you decided to hardball every driver interaction you'd have enough of this content too.

Doesn't matter, you just have to be one step ahead. There will surely be something else next and as long as average people haven't caught up to the "new method", it will work. Life is a constant test of whether you are able to swim at the front.

Oh it's not something new, many larger subreddits require year+ old accounts, so farms have people create accounts for years now, get a little karma, let it sit for awhile then resell it.

Next presidential campaign is going to be brutal to reddit spam/noise filters, I hope they are ready somehow.

>I hope they are ready somehow.

It seems unlikely. It's more likely they'll find a way to use the noise as a revenue source of some sort.

I like duckduckgo bangs as an alternative to this. Just append !r to your search - or any of the others that they have, such as !hn.

I guess the difference is that it tends to use the search within the site you're searching, which might be less than fantastic.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I mean, that's a big difference. reddit's site search is infamously bad.

reddit's whole infrastructure is straight out of a case study

True. Their implementation of a video player baffles the mind too.

I've heard a lot of hate about their video player, but it always works for me.

What exactly is the issue with it?

It's funny, I've never seen it work correctly, even in the simplest case, on any of my devices.

Usually, clicking on the video does nothing. If I wait for enough seconds, it might start, maybe without sound. Or it might start the sound without the image. If I try to skip to some moment that hasn't been loaded yet, it usually just blocks and stops doing anything.

Maybe you have the exact browser/device/screen size/OS combination that the devs test on. Note I don't use the mobile Reddit app, only the website.

I'd like the devs to please just use the browser's <video> reader, without adding their own JS.

What's insulting is that you don't need to go far to get your type of feedback. Yet development efforts are spent on developing gamification mechanism that are utterly pointless, April Fool's or, wait, live streaming? They still manage two concurrent designs and have been for years - it's the longest frontend migration I've ever seen. They just started giving tools to the moderation community that has been keeping their platform alive and moderated.

> They still manage two concurrent designs and have been for years - it's the longest frontend migration I've ever seen.

Maybe the new design is so obviously slower and broken that they see killing old.reddit.com as too risky (cf. the video player, the loss of position in a page when using back/forward, the un-followable comment threads that make you click on "more comments" 10 times a minute, and all the boxes begging for your email address and for you to please use the app).

the exact browser/device/screen size/OS combination that the devs test on

I doubt it. I run Linux and Firefox. And Firefox on Android.

I would look for a reproducible test case but I'd feel like I'm doing Reddit's job for free.

> Note I don't use the mobile Reddit app, only the website.

I’m almost certain this is by design. Make the web shitty enough and you’ll get more app users!

“Reddit is better on the app, and we pulled every last trick in the dirty playbook to make it that way” is what the web banner really means

It always plays the video for a few seconds the first time, than goes back to the beginning and plays it correctly till the end. God forbid if you try to mute/unmute it. On Firefox at least.

Yeeeeaaah, reddit search is garbage, but.......

!g site:reddit.com something I want to find

It’s amazing really that the internet or rather the WWW has become a dumpster fire of shitty articles and ML generated click bait articles. I put Reddit in maybe 80% of my google searches to ensure I get actual quality information.

That's because SEO has ruined everything that isn't heavily community-managed.

How can one believe even for a second that the entire WWW is a dumpster fire of shitty ML generated articles... but at the same time that Reddit, whose only barrier of entry is creating an account (actually a lower barrier of entry that creating a website) is a safe haven of "quality information"?

Food for thought...

Because humans wrote it, and there is an upvote system. Human content > ML content. Are you saying that HN is also not better than ML clickbait content? I doubt it.

The fact that this is the second reddit append tool mentioned on HN within a week means there is obviously something you are not considering.

When you _search_ for content in reddit using Google, the upvote system is irrelevant. You are actually just trusting the same ranking system Google uses for the rest of the Web. Reddit's community moderation does not play a role at all (unless the moderation effectively deleted the content, which it doesn't).

It's not the same to look at HN's frontpage articles (or similarly the most upvoted comments) versus just randomly doing a text search for some obscure topic on HN and looking at whichever crap comes first. Specially when you use the very same search ranking algorithm you already complained tends to give crap.

Because it's not easy to monetize a Reddit post. If you attract people to click on your garbage article, you can display ads and extract value. Meanwhile if you post the same bullshit on Reddit, you get nothing.

This is not to say that there are no bots, paid shills and other issues on Reddit, but it is definitely a good filter. It's the same with Stackoverflow vs most coding sites that just rip them off.

Honestly reddit is pretty bad, much of it feels like an echo chamber/shilling, but when it comes to things not focused on consuming product(e.g. linux) it's pretty helpful and has gotten me out of jams more than I'd care to admit. I think the reason the information is higher quality in those spheres is because there's no incentive to push something. You don't see people pushing a product on you to rip a cd, they just tell you the DD command(results may vary for macos and windows users), wheras in product oriented subreddits I see things being pushed all the time that at second glance are either crap or expensive. Similarly, these SEO sites are simply scraping documentation from oracle, and answers from stack overflow and slapping ads on them to make money. I reckon if reddit users got paid to post we'd see a whole lot more botting.

It's not a belief, it's outcome oriented. I have had more luck troubleshooting a niche issue or finding common viewpoints (negative ones being the most important) on products and problems I am trying to solve via Reddit than the autogen listicles and vaguely related quora posts that make up the vast majority of Google's first 10 page results.

All the signals I am picking up on/using to differentiate a real or usable comment (sometimes paid ones can still be useful!) can of course be gamed the same way Google search or Amazon product reviews can. Reddit can also still be botted.

But in practice I am currently finding more success at home with information sourced from Reddit. That will no doubt change eventually, but right now, it is indeed better for me.

I hint at it above, but we all use Google for different things - buying things, finding things, getting information on a variety of topics. If I'm trying to do something like solve a technical or software issue, it actually doesn't matter if the result is gamed or not - what matters is if I solve the issue. Stackoverflow, Reddit and wikipedia results easily help me reach that end far more often than Google does, especially when Google doesn't seem to often surface the more obscure hobby forums that might have niche information.

With you on this. It depends hugely on which subreddit and the subreddit approach to moderation but on average I would say reddit is reflective of (and in many cases worse than) the general level of quality of the www as a whole.

While I find the use case useful (I often skip the normal search and default to site:reddit.com/site:stackoverflow.com, etc.), it doesn't do enough for me to justify having yet another plugin in my browser. It could be replaced by a text-expansion tool. In my case, it is deep in my muscle memory so typing it by hand doesn't bother me.

Maybe if this extension supported more types of filters commonly used (e.g. filetype/directory).

Upvoted though for increasing awareness about this one simple trick.

I think companies/people who are deep in google SEO have also infiltrated reddit. Still better than Google in some regards but only a matter of time before it is degraded beyond useful value.

I’ve been on the site since 2012 and it’s all I can see. There is a subreddit from around the same time I joined called HailCorporate documenting a lot of the obvious instances but I’ve noticed lately that most people have been trained to mimic the ads just by being on the site for a short time

Lately the most obvious example of what I mean is on the TV subreddit: shows aren’t just shows any more — they are almost always referred to as X on Y where Y is the network or streaming service the show is currently on. Sometimes it results in hilarity as in the case of a show called “You” with the show’s sub called YouOnLifetime - a network it is no longer available on.

A less cynical person would say that people are just trying to help people find the show they’re speaking of, but it ends up being a constant string of Corporate keywords in upvoted posts and wow, just happens to be great for SEO.

Brave search introduced a related feature recently. They have a 'Discussions' section in the search results page where they pull results from online forums (it seems like it's all Reddit for now).

The web and search seem massively broken if we need things like this. It feels like there's a massive opportunity to again make the web more person-to-person rather than corporation/advertisers-to-person.

The problem is that being google a monopoly, people started optimizing websites for the only owner of "search on the internet".

Google is now involved in so much stuff that search seems to not be prominent anymore (when was the last time you see a new big feature in google.com?). And given the fact that being "1st on google" is an outstanding, profitable way to run a website, the uberoptimization is something YOU MUST do.

This way the most optimized website wins, not the best one.

What subject areas does this seem to actually help with? I've heard of people doing it but whenever I try it I seem to get results that are at least as irrelevant as what I'd get from searching the web at large - posts with no replies, or with a bunch of useless and poorly informed ones, random trolling, etc. That is, on the occasions when I'm lucky enough to be able to see the content without Reddit throwing 40 different modals and hiding replies in an effort to get me to sign up.

I like the idea, but a bit hesitant to download the whole extension to try it out. Shameless plug: https://github.com/richardliutl/minimal-scripts/blob/main/bo... JS Bookmarklet accomplishing a similar goal

I don't get it. I think I'm batting .005 with getting a good result from Reddit's "hive mind." And Reddit spams my search results so much that it frequently takes up several of the top slots. The net-net is that I often include "-site:reddit.com" in my searches.

I'm curious what the 995 bad results you're getting from reddit are.

Reddit is big on cargo-cult troubleshooting, you can't show them a TCP windowing problem or path MTU detection failure without "try changing your DNS servers" or "disable auto-negotiate on your Ethernet port" getting a hundred upvotes.

Ah, I see.

Yeah I would never look at reddit for troubleshooting: That's what the various stack-exchange/overflow sites are for... or even better what the specific web forums dedicated to that topic are for.

But I also rarely encounter a problem that doesn't have an answer ready to hand.

My experience with searching Reddit mostly comes for looking for basic shopping suggestions, specific item reviews, general knowledge type info.

If you're looking for detailed and complex analysis of what's going on an open forum that rewards broadly appealing advice and answers is very obviously not the solution.

> Yeah I would never look at reddit for troubleshooting: That's what the various stack-exchange/overflow sites are for

You've hit one of my big beefs with the site. There was a window of a couple of months where it seemed like the ENTIRE first page of results for my programming searches were links to Reddit, which are WORSE than useless. It was clear to me that Reddit was spending INORDINATE amounts of money to have their results pushed to the top. I can't imagine what that had to be to beat out StackOverflow, but that's beside the point. I was already mad about their consumer product "review" cargo culting, but this experience put a chip on my shoulder about ALL of their results now.

I was JUST researching whether air ducts should get cleaned from dust, and google results while mixed were mostly pretty good and gave a quality EPA page as result number one -- not a marketing blog. (Though the question and answer part of google was mixed with the number two question being answered by saying to have them cleaned every 2 to 3 years, which is crazy. Also, I think this crowd is savvier than most about knowing when a website is just marketing and when to ignore it.)

But reddit still had much better information than google overall explaining experiences and why you almost certainly don't need them cleaned minus the 3 reasons EPA mentions.

I sometimes get poor quality reddit score higher than good quality stackoverflow results. I need another internet. The current one is broken.

Just use search.brave.com - they have a section for Reddit discussions

Where? I don't see it when I do a search.

shameless plug but I wrote this Chrome extension a while back which appends the date, # of upvotes and comments to Reddit search results on Google: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-search-help...

What a wonderful extension! Any chance of a Firefox port?

Not sure I'll get around to it but I have the source here if you want to give it a shot: https://github.com/built-by-as/RedditSearchHelper

Thought I was the only one who googles with Reddit as a keyword. Reddit has become a defacto source for reliable information.

I have to respectfully disagree with you there.

As a long-time (10y) user on the site, this is pretty scary to see. Reddit had been an ad incubator that trains people to do their job for a while now, the first signs of it I saw when I signed up in 2012 - probably to call it out back then even (HailCorporate was one of the first subs I joined)

My advice is to be extremely careful considering anything on the site reliable information and not just the output of an extremely effective PR machine

I've seen several of these add Reddit to Google post recently. Curious if this could be turned into a real product or just adding reddit to searches is good enough? Adding reddit to searches seams to remove all the spammy seo targeted post that are not helpful.

I built a site that is more like a search engine but uses Google: https://gooreddit.com/

An entire extension to append a string?

The better solution is not to use Google at all. Google invades our privacy and Google keep its users hostages for money. We've to stop Google at any cost.

Making the same comment over and over again is really not adding anything to the discussion.

I'm actually working on an alternative to Google (though the goal being improved search, not improved privacy), I made this extension during one of the breaks from working on that

> not improved privacy

To offer some alternative, startpage.com uses google search results and claims to be more privacy oriented.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com