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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense that Google did this deal since their search quality tanked and they became an de facto front end UI for Reddit.

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Up until 2016 (I think, +/- 1 year), if you could remember 3 uncommon words in a comment, you could find any reddit post instantly on Google. I'd want to follow up on a thread from weeks ago, and it was magic. Number one result. Then one day that just stopped working, and even adding site:*.reddit.com didn't fix it. At the time, I think, I didn't realize that it was mostly Google's fault, I thought maybe Reddit had changed their infrastructure so that it couldn't be crawled properly.

Google hasn't been a search engine in a long while, it's just an advertisement engine now.

it's so bad it's crazy, you can legit not find stuff on the internet anymore, it's the same with youtube, I search something and get like 20 or so results and then everything else is hidden.

it started when youtube removed the ability to search for videos older than 5 years, if I had to guess? cost saving, have every old video in cheaper storage... but it sort of fragments youtube, every couple of years you only get newer content.

One day I was searching live videos of a local band from youtube and when sorting by upload date the oldest video was from 2010. I knew for a fact there had to be older videos so I got a youtube API key and searched via the API, ended up finding multiple videos starting from 2006. Learned that youtube is full of videos that are basically impossible to find with the regular search.

One of my past times is looking up anime opening reactions for fun/to hear people listen to bands I enjoy that sometimes do anime ops, searching that is so scary, you see the same 4 people or every month or so you get 1 or get 1 removed, you can't tell me there's not more than 4 people on the internet that upload opening reactions... when anime is a billion+ dollar industry, if you know particular channels you can see daily uploads on plenty of channels, that are simply search banned for whatever reason by the algorithm.

But yeah, the most outrageous one is older videos, I do believe the reason is that they are using some long term cloud storage that is cheaper for older videos so they removed the ability to search by date.

Additionally, I don't believe the API fully fixes it, because Bing has a wrapper for youtube and searches do not really vary

Youtube will show me 3 results, tops, that are relevant to my query, then start showing irrelevant recommendations.

Have you tried Verbatim search in Google?

"we noticed that since our search results had gotten so bad nobody can use them to find the things they want, people just kept adding "reddit" to search terms anyways, so we figured we might as well make it official and exclusive"

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