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Comment by idontwantthis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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