Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche

Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @03:31PM (#27295008)

I haven't seen a single social media or messaging platform where search didn't suck. Reddit search was bad, after redesign it's just hot garbage. Messenger search is unreliable and near-useless. Facebook search only worked well for the brief moment when they introduced "graph search", but that got quickly killed due to popular outrage. HN's bolted-on Algolia search is the least bad I've seen. And let's not even talk about Twitter, Instagram or Slack.

I'd go as far as saying that search features are being underdeveloped on purpose - perhaps they allow usage patterns that service owners don't like.

But then, Mastodon's search is even worse than Twitter, and that project has no incentive to disenfranchise their users. So I'm honestly confused about all this.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by stingraycharles on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @03:45PM (#27295165)

I think it’s a combination of “search is hard” and “witty comments / titles make it even harder to search for”.

I’d argue most of these sites would be far better off with just using Algolia or Google as their main search engine and calling it a day.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by whatyesaid on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @08:25PM (#27297879)

It's not some impossible problem with their resources. I think it's moreso the case that they prioritize newer (but less relevant) stuff you can still engage/social-mediaize with than the actual query even if you don't use the new filter.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by derefr on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @11:43PM (#27299151)

Google even has a Custom Search API that allows a site's backend to treat Google Search as (essentially) its own search cluster, ala ElasticSearch.

Oddly, I've never heard of any actually using this API. Sites that integrate with Google only ever seem to do so by having their search box bounce you to a Google Search page.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by obventio56 on Thursday May 27, 2021 @01:24AM (#27299691)

We do https://www.thecrimson.com/search/

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by tsian2 on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @04:43PM (#27295849)

This lead me to believe that search must really hard to implement, but then a few days of getting into Sphinx convinced me otherwise. It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials). They could do better, they just don't.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @10:02PM (#27298531)

"It's kind of like the big sites where you have to load the whole video before it'll start playing (no HTTP partials)."

It sounds like this is decribing the so-called "moov atom" begin placed at the end of the file.^1

1. https://www.adobe.com/devnet/video/articles/mp4_movie_atom.h...

If not, can anyone provide some examples of these "big sites". Would like to test.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by medstrom on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @05:52PM (#27296564)

Um. Example of sites where you have to load the whole video? I've never seen that in my life (I'm 29).

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by na85 on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @06:11PM (#27296747)

I'm only 35 and I remember this. It was quite common before YouTube.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by slimsag on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @07:18PM (#27297346)

27 and I remember this vaguely.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by mooreds on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @06:28PM (#27296917)

As long as we're piling on about search, here are my two least favorite site searches:

   * meetup
   * AWS docs

Going straight to google for both of these nets better results 99% of the time.

It's probably a cycle at this point. More people use google (or other general search), so these sites optimize for them, rather than invest in the site search experience. General search engines are where the users are coming from.

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Re:Show HN: Find Subreddits for Your Niche by tshaddox on Wednesday May 26, 2021 @05:29PM (#27296369)

Slack’s search is excellent for me. I use it probably at least once a week to find something important for work. Granted, I’m usually searching for things that I know will be an exact substring match of the message I’m looking for, but for that it works great for me.

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