[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.