I'm by no means a Google-hater, but I have to say, it's pretty hard to feel bad for a company which has infinite money and no shortage of smart people they can throw at problems. If they didn't have such an attention-deficit company strategy and had developed Google Groups/not dropped the ball on chat 10-15 times they could have people trying to search their own servers instead of Reddits.
They had an entire product for encouraging people to share knowledge back when they had less money. It wasn't an instant hit, so they gave up on it, and shut it down once everyone forgot about it.
Did Google stop indexing forums because they vanished, or did they vanish because Google stopped indexing them? I'm wondering if this dependence on Reddit is self-inflicted.
I think what happened is the forums were built on old platforms that couldn’t deal with the influx of bots and instead of upgrading them, the administrators shut them down, with dwindling popularity it didn’t make sense to make the investment.
Gee, if only Google had some kind of "Show Cached" button that worked reliably and wasn't too hidden or prone to inscrutable rules for when it is/isn't visible... :P
The Cache button hasn't worked for me for around a decade, I used to use it regularly.