8 ms·

Ask HN: Why does Reddit search suck so much?

28 points by 0x00_ 9y ago

I'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.

marcofiset 9y ago
Maybe you think it sucks, but it's still much better than no search at all. Looking at you HN.
- tedivm 9y ago
  There's a search bar right at the bottom of this page, and it seems to work.
  - marcofiset 9y ago
    Well, TIL. Thanks.
    - soreasan 9y ago
      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.
      - Arizhel 9y ago
        Me too; this is the first I've heard of it. I guess I never scrolled down enough to see it.
- wand3r 9y ago
  It is provided by YC Company Algolia. Many YC companies leverage the software provided by other YC companies. If you were a one of the first YC companies and you're core business was to aggregate, curate and influence the development of content. And you weren't able to develop a core service, hypothetically something like search. Maybe you could buy that service from some other company; like Algolia. Potentially, it would work the same way as HN does. The site they cloned when they pivoted.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  Is it though? Reddit is so bad I just us Google and search it indirectly, so it may as well be non-existent.
lacker 9y ago
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.
- microwavecamera 9y ago
  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.
  - Declanomous 9y ago
    I personally think the search sucks because good search takes a lot of resources (in many different ways) and they prefer to allocate those resources elsewhere. I remember creating a search function in school, and while it worked pretty well, I'm not sure it would work well for an organization with as much information as Reddit. As for reddit-level money, does reddit even make all that much compared to their expenses?
  - skylark 9y ago
    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.
    - 9y ago
soulchild37 9y ago
I use http://searchreddit.net/ http://searchreddit.net/ to search reddit since I discovered this site in IndieHackers, its fast and matching reasonably.
- searchhn 9y ago
  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.
seanwilson 9y ago
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.

28 points by 0x00_ 9y ago

I'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.

marcofiset 9y ago

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

tedivm 9y ago
There's a search bar right at the bottom of this page, and it seems to work.
- marcofiset 9y ago
  Well, TIL. Thanks.
  - soreasan 9y ago
    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.
    - Arizhel 9y ago
      Me too; this is the first I've heard of it. I guess I never scrolled down enough to see it.
wand3r 9y ago
It is provided by YC Company Algolia. Many YC companies leverage the software provided by other YC companies. If you were a one of the first YC companies and you're core business was to aggregate, curate and influence the development of content. And you weren't able to develop a core service, hypothetically something like search. Maybe you could buy that service from some other company; like Algolia. Potentially, it would work the same way as HN does. The site they cloned when they pivoted.
EpicEng 9y ago
Is it though? Reddit is so bad I just us Google and search it indirectly, so it may as well be non-existent.

lacker 9y ago

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.

microwavecamera 9y ago
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.
- Declanomous 9y ago
  I personally think the search sucks because good search takes a lot of resources (in many different ways) and they prefer to allocate those resources elsewhere. I remember creating a search function in school, and while it worked pretty well, I'm not sure it would work well for an organization with as much information as Reddit. As for reddit-level money, does reddit even make all that much compared to their expenses?
- skylark 9y ago
  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.
  - 9y ago

soulchild37 9y ago

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

searchhn 9y ago
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.

seanwilson 9y ago

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.