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Comment by bogtog | Hacker News Reader

> Because Reddit has horrible search

Sorry, but I've heard this so often, and I just don't know what people mean. I use the search whenever I need to get something from a specific subreddit, and it just seems fine. Also, why would a major website like Reddit have such a bad search? Aren't mostly fine search algorithms freely available?

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One of the big mysteries of the software industry. Not specifically singling out reddit here, since I don't even search on reddit: Why can we not simply have search functions, that at least optionally do a substring search? If I had a $currency-unit for every search that fails at this basic thing, I wouldn't need to work any longer.

Off the top if my head I can think of two reasons.

1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search.

2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)

"Users don't know what they want" is absolutely pervasive in the tech world.

Search the same thing rephrased slightly differently 5 times to find the right result, and I can show you 5 sets of ads related closely to the topic of your search.

Because you can't implement that with efficient data structures like posting lists.

Reddit search is good if you know what you're looking for -- specific words, preferably a time period.

It is terrible as a semantic search. If you go to r/travel and search for "France", it will not turn up posts about Paris unless the post specifically includes "france".

Perhaps a bit hyperbolic on my part, it is fine, but it’s poor for the velocity of content it produces. Up until 2 years ago it lacked comment search… [1] which afaik can only search only so far back as well. It also doesn’t search it’s full corpus. There are third party tools which which allow for search a specific time period for this reason [2]. Although google works better here too. With better listing.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_wit...

2. https://www.redditsearchtool.com

Google does a better job of taking your exact search and returning fuzzy results that are pretty relevant (usually extremely relevant), whereas reddit search just pulls up results that have your terms in them as they are written. Google might also do some ranking based on other users searching for similar things, while afaik reddit is pretty "dumb" search.

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