For what its worth the reddit search function seemed to have functioned much better a decade ago.
The amount of spam and just downright completely irrelevant results that showed up regularly in searches there the last few years has been ridiculous. I think it changed around the time they took away being able to see how many upvotws and downvotes a comment had totally, which I do still think is a real shame they took that away.
Yeah Reddit search was fine on the original old Reddit UI, it was around the time the native app released that it really started to shit itself and not return any results and just say try again later
Not to mention the only way to go back and find something on their site. Their in house search bar is a useless piece of junk. Back when I would use reddit, I would open up google if I had to find something in reddit.
They seem to intend to make the content on Reddit more disposable, which is a feat unto itself. Technical forum usage will precipitously drop if no one can find it. Or they just endlessly repost it? What an odd decision.
If they cut Google, I will literally never go to Reddit again. I probably hit a couple pages a week from Google search, and that's it, but that will be zero pages if they are truly this dumb.
Tbh it probably is. I don't use Reddit much anymore for discussion or news or memes, but when I need the answer to a problem or an opinion on a product or service from actual people instead of an overly long review listicle, Reddit search results are still very useful.
Spez is going full Musk. It's actually insane. Like... Holy shit.
I'm praying for Reddit's downfall here, because if companies are able to get away with this shit the internet is going to get oh so much worse in the near future.
But at the same time, it sucks. I still use Reddit for episode discussions of shows I watch (which don't exist here on Lemmy, especially for older shows). I don't want those to go away without some replacement. Even if Lemmy did suddenly start getting lots of active episode discussions, it's not really possible to backfill them for older shows and the site is still too small and hard to index, it seems.
Incidentally, google is the only way I access those, since I no longer browse Reddit normally.