[nsgi]

Both Reddit and Stack Overflow have plenty of sites scraping their content and hosting copies. People would just go to those sites from Google instead of the real ones.

Also, I can see the value of Stack Overflow to Google but what value does Reddit add? Isn't most of the content on there disposable?

[esperent]

So in the last couple of days I've ended up doing a lot of research into equipment that I wasn't familiar with - commercial coffee equipment - and what I quickly found is that standard Google results are pretty much all blogspam. Not terrible info but it all feels like advertising while what I want is shared experiences from people who have actually used the equipment, not blogs that are actually ads from people who are trying to sell it to me.

So far I've found two places with actual useful info: YouTube and reddit. YouTube has a reasonably working search engine so I just search directly there. Reddit doesn't so I end up adding site:reddit.com to all my Google searches.

Maybe there's some better forums than reddit that I haven't found yet, but this mirrors my experience from a couple of months ago when searching for new headphones, and a few months before that when researching a new laptop. All the interesting discussion is happening on reddit, and all the Google results are disguised sales pitches ("thanks for reading! Now click my affiliate link"). I'm close to automatically just adding reddit to all my Google searches when I'm researching something new.

Try an experiment. Think of a new product you might want to purchase, say, scuba diving masks . Search "best scuba diving masks" on Google. Now try adding "site: reddit.com" and check again. Which search do you think gives you more honest, useful info from people who are genuinely into scuba diving and not just trying to make a quick buck with a scuba blog?

Note: I don't know anything about diving and I haven't tested these terms, I'm just very sure it will be true for any random product you pick.

[petra]

The problem with reddit is that the comments there could also be ads, and it's harder to tell.

[noogle]

Ranking results by author's credibility (site karma) could help, at least for the time being.

It's not that the comments are plain ads (these will be easy for the reader to discern), it's dishonest product reviews. It's an unsolved problem in e-commerce websites and even in real life.

[freeflight]

Tho marketers are slowly catching on to this with product placements on Reddit.

[wccrawford]

A lot of people add "reddit" to their search results for certain types of searches, including product reviews. It provides a ton of information from real people and cuts a lot of the garbage out.

[OscarCunningham]

So why is it that I can never find my old reddit comments if I want to refer back to them?

[optimalsolver]

Try this and search by your username:

https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/

[OscarCunningham]

Thank you! For some reason other reddit searching apps don't seem to work for me, but that one does.