
Ask HN: Why does Reddit search suck so much? - 0x00_
I&#x27;m just curious what the technical challenge is there and was hoping someone here who is an expert in that space could ELI5 it to me.
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lacker
In general, people are trained by Google to expect a lot out of a search. On
Google you can phrase a search in a number of ways that don't precisely map to
how the ideal content phrases it, and still figure it out. This works because
Google has a massive amount of data - data from searches about what words are
generally synonyms of other words, data from other pages on the internet that
link to the target page, and data about what past searchers have done.

When you do a site-specific search, or a search on an internal corporate site,
much of this data is often totally absent. So it may just not be possible to
build a search with as high a quality as you expect, on that corpus, with
modern technology.

Source: I don't know anything about Reddit search specifically but I was
formerly a search expert and I am pretty sure this is what's going on here.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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soulchild37
I use [http://searchreddit.net/](http://searchreddit.net/) to search reddit
since I discovered this site in IndieHackers, its fast and matching
reasonably.

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searchhn
Thank you ! Also [http://vis.searchreddit.net](http://vis.searchreddit.net) to
visualize search results.

Also [http://searchhn.com](http://searchhn.com) for a realtime hacker news
search. All of these demos are being rebuilt from scratch and hopefully will
be out in a week.

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seanwilson
I'm guessing reddit search simply isn't used often enough for them to dedicate
resources to improving it. The site is primarily about having a constant
stream of new posts anyway. Worst case you can use Google.

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marcofiset
Maybe you think it sucks, but it's still much better than no search at all.
Looking at you HN.

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tedivm
There's a search bar right at the bottom of this page, and it seems to work.

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marcofiset
Well, TIL. Thanks.

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soreasan
I wasn't aware of the search bar on HN either. Would be nice if it was at the
top of the page rather than the bottom.

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Arizhel
Me too; this is the first I've heard of it. I guess I never scrolled down
enough to see it.

