Comment by LarryMullins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LarryMullins | Hacker News Reader

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Google's propensity to return reddit results is a negative to me. Reddit almost never has the information I'm looking for, particularly ever since their website redesign. Even if the search result takes me to a reddit comment section that might have the result, reddit will only show me the top N% of comments in that discussion and then when I scroll down, I see irrelevant top-level posts on reddit about people's cat pictures or something. Yes I know I can install an extension to redirect me to old.reddit.com, but fuck that noise. Reddit answers are virtually never worth that effort anyway.

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.

OP was saying that the search quality of sites vary and used the commonly cited example that Reddit’s search bar with “<search query>” is not as good as doing a Google search with “<search query> site:reddit.com”

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.

Don't think they were talking about google returning reddit results for generic searches, which doesn't happen that much and certainly isn't a highlight feature like it is for Bing and DuckDuckGo. When it comes to generic searches, google's biggest problem is SEO-farming blogs that are substantially lower quality than even the most inane reddit comment from someone pretending to be an expert.

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.

Interesting. My experience is the exact opposite and I lot of my review searches are start by adding “Reddit” to the end.

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 setup a custom search under search engines in chrome/settings which basically maps !r to google+reddit e.g. : SE: GReddit Shortcut: !r https://google.com/search?q=site:reddit.com+%s

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.

If you log into your reddit account you don't need an extension you can opt out of the redesign and automatically and always see the old site design.

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