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Comment by mthreat | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to hear your ideas for improving search. IndexTank improved reddit's search greatly when they took it over, but IndexTank is shutting down in one month. At Searchify, we would love to power reddit's search, and are willing to spend a good amount of resources to make sure the results are good.

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As a reddit user here is my experience. Reddit's search tool is terrible if you want to find a thread about a specific topic. It only searches for exact keyword matches and only in the title, not in the thread body. Add to this the fact that reddit users have a habit of link baiting their submission titles such that the titles rarely have any useful information and the search function is practically useless.

If I want to check reddit's opinion on something I have to resort to doing a google search like "site:reddit.com lopping tree branches".

You're correct - the current search only searches the titles. This is one of the most common complaints, and one that we would love to help reddit fix. One challenge is there are 5 to 10 times as many comments as there are threads. So a search index for that would be much larger, require more machines and RAM, and in the end it would be quite a bit more expensive for reddit to offer.

Oh, I understand that. The "search" feature of reddit is just so underwhelming that it doesn't even really feel like a feature. It feels like it's just a temporary kludge.

External sites are so much more useful it's crazy. Google lets me search comments and I can search in subreddits using "site:reddit.com/r/subname foo". Tineye + Karmadecay lets me even search for threads about an image or gif.

I haven't thought about it that much, but I've noticed very high latency using IndexTank recently. Probably a proxying problem or something because it always reports a fast search time even when it isn't. It takes 10 seconds but says 0.02 seconds. You can't search comments at all. No date range support. No stemming.

It'd be cool if they outsourced it to someone like you who would put more time into it.

The .02 seconds is how long the actual search took, the rest of it is how long it took for the reddit appserver to respond.

You're just seeing slow reddit response times.

slow reddit, i dont believe it!

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