I prefer https://redditsearch.io/ but Google works too

Thanks, never heard of it. Already returning better results for me.

But does anyone know why search on Reddit is broken? Perhaps intentionally? I don't want to get tin foil hatty but perhaps more not readily apparent false positives = more user clicks = more revenue via ad serving?

I often wonder why some fairly large companies that rely heavily on their own website don't seem to put more than a sole web developer worth of resources into them. Reddit fits into that category for me (Reddit has 400 employees).

Initially I had the impression that search was hard to implement. However, spending a work week figuring it out with ElasticSearch, Solr and Sphinx changed my mind. Getting the solution to work with the scale of the website would take more work, but all the know-how is there, and they could put a whole team to the task for a month.

I wouldn't say it's a trivial ask, but yeah, if you have 400 employees at least assign some resources to get it right. Unless it's intentionally broken. Facebook's prioritization but also randomization of the feed is a feature not a bug.

Because search is difficult to get right. So most sites just implement a basic feature and then assume users will use Google.

Simple: because Google has a ton more data on what content is relevant on Reddit than Reddit itself does.