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?
1. Doing stemming is hard with substring search.
2. Substring search is more expensive. (Bigger indexed and more joins/merges)
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/u3oz2x/whats_up_wit...
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".
I think it's 100% this. But, maybe worse. While Google is claiming they are simply giving users what they want (e.g. observing that users were adding reddit to search terms), I believe they were also getting their asses handed to them by SEO spam / gaming and their search quality nose-dived. In the last year or so I have noticed a very sharp degradation in quality, including non-user language obvious content spam taking top results.
It's almost like their algo was finally broken for good and they had no response or didn't want to invest in the continued SEO cat-and-mouse while they pivot their search to AI.
So, hardcoding to Reddit et. al. was the quick fix.
>Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation
But, it does seem that at one time it was much better, and reliably provided reasonably useful results to non-explictly moderated results.
Further, I feel the role subreddits are playing is not too different to the role curated directories used to play in sorting and filtering the web ecosystem for Google when it’s algorithm was considered good. So while there is a lot of user generated content, i feel the real benefit of Reddit to the Google algorithms quality of output, is the human sorting of content.
So my theory follows: the Google algorithm has never been independently good, it has always been dependant on a large source of human curation. The Google algorithm only works well when Reddit is applied to it, because Google supplanted, or ignores the other places it happens on the web. Or worse, they've promoted and paid attention to unauthentic content curation through their SEO and 'trusted' sources initiatives spoiling their source pool they themselves drink from.