[microwavecamera]

I don't know, I rolled my own search feature for a previous project just using mysql full text search with weighted results and ended up with something that worked way better than reddit's search function. Building the next google is hard but building a functional search feature isn't exactly rocket science, especially when you have reddit level money.

[Declanomous]

I personally think the search sucks because good search takes a lot of resources (in many different ways) and they prefer to allocate those resources elsewhere.

I remember creating a search function in school, and while it worked pretty well, I'm not sure it would work well for an organization with as much information as Reddit.

As for reddit-level money, does reddit even make all that much compared to their expenses?

[skylark]

Is that a fair comparison? Reddit has a ridiculous amount of data to search through. I feel like if improving search was so trivial, they would have done it already.

[microwavecamera]

Well they do have a search that works reasonably fast, so they have the infrastructure already. It's just not that good. It's a algorithm/methodology issue. I can understand if they were still in startup mode or it wasn't 2017. I'm not saying the method I mentioned would be a solution for something on reddit's scale but we live in an age of readily available data analytic solutions and open-source search engines. An open-source solution like Solr would work, I just don't think reddit has any motivation to solve the issue.

Edit: Found this on reddit's wikipedia page:

"On July 21, 2010, Reddit outsourced the Reddit search engine to Flaptor, who used its search product IndexTank.[91] As of July 12, 2012, Reddit uses Amazon CloudSearch."

It seems to be an implementation issue, not a technological one.