[groffee]

> With this latest update, for the first time in sixteen years everything on Reddit is now searchable - users, posts, communities, and now comments - making Reddit one of the first platforms with this capability.

I mean this is a straight up blatant lie, every single forum/social site out there has proper search and has for years, I know all of mine do. Most of them you even have image search.

So honest question, how does a multi-million dollar site just not have such basic functionality? Does it not matter?

Better question, and this is something I see time and again, how do sites missing such basic functionality even get any funding to start with? It's just weird. Reddit didn't even have a working user block till recently either.

[raldi]

It's also a lie because "everything" on reddit is still not in fact searchable; buried in the comments on the announcement post, they admit that pre-2020 comments are still not indexed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_wit...

[whymauri]

LOL!

Well time to continue using "site:www.reddit.com" on Google, then. I find the old search from old.reddit.com to be way better than the newer search (but I haven't tried this newest search linked in the thread).

[Melatonic]

Interesting - I did not even know that old.reddit used a different search. I rarely even use the search (occasionally I will use it to search a specific subreddit and assume it is only searching post titles). I pretty much exclusively use old.reddit + customized reddit enhancement suite and on mobile use the app Reddit is Fun. Anytime I have to go back to vanilla new reddit it feels like a totally different site. I'm not even really changing the default subscriptions all that much either at all - often I browse without being signed in. The part I find the most odd is that even without signing in the "hot" algo seems to organize top posts occasionally differently between the two (old and new).

[Melatonic]

LOL This is ridiculous. The majority of Reddit is Pre-2020 !

Or as I like to call it - The Before Covid times. BC. Surely there's no other acronym that uses those two letters. 2018 BC was a good year for me personally

[Handytinge]

Wouldn't that be 1BC?

[bduerst]

This is likely intentional though.

Reddit's engagement model relies on new posts with which to comment on. Being able to easily find previous content means less reposting, and less opportunities to give users a place to engage. A standard, working search function would only hurt reddit's growth metrics.

It's so obvious to the userbase that you have certain users complaining about reposts, or even subreddits that intentionally flag for original content (OC).

[vinnymac]

In other words, the most valuable dataset (the majority of the data) is not yet searchable.

[rjh29]

I expect post-2020 is the majority of the data given Reddit's exponential growth. But definitely pre-2020 is more valuable.

[wtf_is_up]

Any data to suggest that the past 2 years have generated the majority of reddit's data? I've been a user for a decade and it doesn't feel like this is the case to me.

[pavs]

Hi Raldi, when did last work with Reddit. I can't remember, genuinely curious.

[raldi]

2008-2011

[ahtihn]

I don't understand why search is something that Reddit needs to have. Google does the job perfectly fine. Search isn't a core feature for Reddit and it's certainly not "basic" functionality.

[pmlamotte]

Google does an okay job and certainly is the best option for searching Reddit that I'm aware of, but there are many cases where Google breaks (largely due to Reddit's site). It's common to get results that don't match anything in the content itself, but matches a title in the "more from this subreddit" section at the time Google scraped it. Dates are often wrong so adding date filters often doesn't work as expected.

Even old Reddit has the "more from this subreddit" type links now so I imagine it breaks even if you scope your query to the old domain. I noticed most of this appeared after they launched the new Reddit UI, I don't remember having this problem in the past. Note that these are problems they could likely fix so I agree, but any platform can likely build a more context aware search as well.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but don't work on search, opinions are my own, blah blah

[CreatedAccount]

Yeah, the broken date range search drives me nuts. "Oh, there's a month old reddit post about what I'm searching for... nvm, it's 4 years old."

[wlesieutre]

I’ve always assumed Reddit is lying about dates on purpose for SEO reasons

[endisneigh]

How can you search specific comments in a single Reddit post with Google accurately?

Take a recent Reddit post and try on Google:

site:https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/u3vzo2/russia_wa... arms

Even subreddit comment search on Google is flimsy due to Reddit not properly exposing the dates, so Google's indexed dates are usually wrong.

[Melatonic]

I find this hit or miss - often Google gets it right and often it does not. Definitely would be nice if they were able to fix this!

[aghilmort]

yes, hit or miss on comments; appears Google indexed that post ~15 hours ago

does work properly for those comments did index, e.g., https://breezethat.com/?q=%22Putin+is+in+no+shape%22+site%3A...

[pineconewarrior]

People have complained about the poor quality of Reddit search for as long as it has existed.

Aside from that, certainly, a site with its own indexing and awareness of its own internal structure can provide a better search experience than a third-party.

[jasonladuke0311]

> I don't understand why search is something that Reddit needs to have. Google does the job perfectly fine.

No, it absolutely does not. I have used Google to search Reddit for a string and got no results. That string was present in a Reddit comment open in another tab. It was a few years old so there is very little chance it hadn't been indexed yet.

[Melatonic]

Good search is really a must for any forum though - I remember back in the day when more forums were independent (pre Reddit) and less moderated a common thing to tell a new user that made a very common (repeated) post was to use the search function. Some people were dicks about it but often people just were gently steering the person in the right direction. No need to have the same exact post every week clogging things up when a simple search can lead you to high quality discussion content on the same exact topic.

[CryptoBanker]

But then Reddit doesn’t get to collect all the search data. I would imagine knowing what people are actually looking for is quite valuable

[next_xibalba]

Increasing impressions/time-on-site increases ad inventory and also juices all the other engagement numbers.

This is a good move by Reddit (whose search has always been abominable). Many HN'ers have pointed out that they add "reddit" to their Google searches, ex: "<product X> reviews reddit". Why let Google get the ad dollars for that SERP?

[samstave]

Maybe they set it up to be more easily crawlable by AI bots internal to reddit to begin developing a sale-able data pack on the profiles of its users?

[Barrin92]

because reddit is a for-profit business and if it can wrestle search from Google obviously it will. In a broader sense the internet is moving away from its protocol nature to vertically integrated firms and you can expect this fragmentation of search in many places.

[fintechjock]

site:www.reddit.com/r/whatever_subreddit "whatever you are searching for"

Works for me every time. I haven't used Reddit search in 10 years.

I'm at a loss for why anyone would want to read Reddit comments in the first place though. At least on one of the top 100 subs.

[stevage]

Subs like AskReddit literally are their comments. That's why you read them.

[Melatonic]

Comments are literally the whole point of forums - what the point be if people did NOT want to read the comments?

I agree there are a lot of crap comments on the bigger default subs (as is the same with any forum) but those are relatively easy to ignore and recognize with experience. Or maybe I just have been using internet forums for too long !

[bombcar]

Even for private subreddits? Severe doubt.

[fintechjock]

That isn’t a problem faced by the vast majority of Reddit users. What I posted is a workaround that has been available since Reddit was founded and would be useful for the average user to know.

[cush]

Scale. Basic stops being basic at their insane scale.

[syrrim]

Basic was previously provided by an external service called pushshift, which was free to use and allowed searching individual comments.

[cush]

Right exactly. It easily works as an external toy project, now throw a hundred million people at it.

[bobbob1921]

I understand your point, but scale also applies to reddits resources and number of developers / options, so I disagree with this reasoning/excuse.

[jdauriemma]

You might be surprised at how small the Reddit team is

[whymauri]

They keep raising money. Might as well hire more and pay better. I'm blown away that after nearly 2 decades, search is effectively unfunded at this company.

[criddell]

> Might as well hire more and pay better

Would you want to work there? I suspect a lot of great candidates want nothing to do with that company.

[whymauri]

If they paid competitively, yes.

[xeromal]

Scale isn't a linear kind of problem though. The complexity, if not carefully managed, in my experience grows faster than linearly.

I always see Salesforce as a huge company with tons of resources whose products struggle frequently.

[cush]

This is what Reddit did. Just because you can throw developers and resources at a problem, does not make that problem basic.

[Melatonic]

Reddit search has always been laughably bad - it is quite amazing that for the biggest and most popular forum on the internet they have not worked harder on this. Reddit should have the BEST search on the internet.

Or hell - can they not just pay Google and embed a customized version into their site?

[robertoandred]

> one of the first platforms

I mean, I'm one of the first humans, just one of the first 117 billion. Weasel words will get you anywhere!

[krolden]

The userbase is what made reddit valuable to conde mast and all the investors since then.

[aadvark69]

multi-billion* dollar site

[cscurmudgeon]

"Better question, and this is something I see time and again, how do sites missing such basic functionality even get any funding to start with? "

By abandoning ethics and building a moat so that those with ethics can't breach the moat.

"In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...