An absolute ton of search results can't be viewed right now because subreddits are locked down.

That might be better for Google. Now, when I google for reviews or brand recommendations, I won't get reddit anymore. Could reddit be biased? Absolutely. Is the entire first page of google full of bias, ads, and outright lies? Absolutely. But those ads pay Google; Reddit doesn't.

Because when you visit a search result you get a page saying the page is private instead of content.

As a tip, if you just need to read the content from the search result then they seem to be commonly available in the wayback machine:

https://web.archive.org

It does mean you need to cut-n-paste the Reddit url there, but it's been working for the content I needed to look into yesterday.

Which has always been the case for anything tagged NSFW, or anything at all in a mobile browser. Every piece of SEO advice says this will get downranked from Google, but Reddit demonstrates this isn't true.

But are they serving a 410 (or other eeror code?) ? Looks like no to me. The algo may not respond as fast

Google knows if you follow a search result, then quickly go back to the search page.

A lot of the Google search results for reddit lead to a error page or subreddit is now private, not the content Google originally indexed.

Wow, Reddit is going to lose a lot of pagerank.

To add it to killedbygoogle.com