Have you never searched for a problem where you wanted to hear actual people talk about the solution? If I don't suffix it with "Reddit" I just get SEO spam/AI generated articles which may or may not actually be useful. Usually I want to know what real people think about the issue.
100% agree.
While I think it might be easier to get to a relevant result more quickly in certain cases, I've never needed to suffix reddit to my searches to find what I need. Often reddit hits crop up but not because I looked for them specifically.
When you know a post exists, and you type its exact title into reddits search, and it gives you inrelated bullshit so you need to go to google who hand you the exact post you knew existed, it annoys you.
When you do that every time you try reddits search function, you start to really hate it.
Idk I always found the result sorting to be, I mean, obscenely bad. I would find better more accurate results searching in Google "r/whateversub" followed by whatever it was I was trying to find.
Reddit's search was broken when I joined in 2009 and it never improved. The only thing that made Reddit searchable was Google.
Reddit somehow missed that the value of the was in the comments, not the post. Post titles are easily searchable but searching the comments using Reddit's own search is still difficult. It mystifies me how badly the people running Reddit misunderstand the most basic things about it.
I'm pretty sure reddit's search is basically fake, a stopgap "todo" placeholder that never got done. It always seemed like they wanted us to forget that Reddit is even supposed to be searchable, but now we know that search really is against their mission somehow. Even from the perspective of greed it never made sense to me.
I doubt reddit makes much revenue from traffic generated by search queries. I suspect People endlessly scrolling their feed are more likely to click ads