It’s heavily dependent on the quality of the search offered. For example — Reddit’s search functionality is terrible. I’ve found that Google is much better for searching Reddit.
Consumer advice on reddit is worthless, the subreddits about products are all run by shill-mods paid by the companies making the products. Technical information on reddit is often confidently wrong. And for general inquiries, reddit is worse than yahoo answers ever was. Most of the "I'm a [profession] and I have [experiences and opinions]" posts on reddit seem to be "creative writing" exercises, aka liars motivated by the karma system to make shit up.
For opinions on non-tech topics and products Reddit is my #1 source, and I haven’t got burned even once.
But I’ll admit it’s not my only source, and I always cross reference my findings.
I have a similar one for github too:
gh : order by last updated, with > 5 stars, and has been pushed to since 1/1/2022.
Rather, when they are specifically looking for something on reddit, using google is much easier than actually using reddit. Counter to the above person's advice in using the site's specific search over general search engines.
Which makes sense, there are a lot of great posts on reddit when you know what you're looking for. Not so great for general advice.
You are describing the fact you don’t like to look at Reddit which is a bit different as OP was just using Reddit as an example for a general concept of using google instead of a site’s internal search functionality.
Incidentally you can solve your issue by typing “<search query> -site:reddit.com” to remove any results coming from Reddit instead of having to scroll past results you don’t want to see.
Results are often completely irrelevant, or dismissive of the search terms.
You search for a refrigerator filter from a known refrigerator manufacturer and the first results you get are the toxic offbrand refrigerator filters from companies with randomly generated company names that poison your entire family.
Somehow Amazon has managed to make the bloated Aliexpress experience seem more straight forward and easy to navigate.
Companies create multiple subsidiaries with randomly generated names, so they can spam search results and faceted results with their products and exclude other vendors. Search for "flying bird cat toy" and you'll see what I mean.
Much of that could be solved using a filter by country of origin. Because the usual suspects are always from the same territory.
Why is this necessary? because shell companies sell products loaded with lead, cadmium, phthalates, formaldehyde, VOCs, and other highly toxic stuff.