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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Technology
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Literally the single prominent technical problem that has spanned Reddit's entire life is the lack of a decent search engine. In general, people fell back to Google because Reddit's was abysmal.
So is Reddit gonna finally build something decent? Because if they don't let Google index them, and they disabled Pushshift access, it's gonna be hard to search the content.
I doubt Reddit builds a decent search engine, that doesn't actually help them at all.
If users can search, they find a previous post pertaining to what they want to see/know and they move on.
If there's no search, users can't find old posts or comments so they make new posts about a previously posted topic and more comments are made as other users react. That's more content, even if low quality from a user perspective, that shows engagement which can be sold to advertisers.
That's before considering the engineering effort it takes to make a good search engine, constantly fine tune that algorithm, and try to outpace those that are trying to game the search algorithm.
Did they improve their app after shutting down third party apps? I honestly don’t know but I’m thinking no and no to improving their search function.
Nope. I tried as a stopgap solution and it's basically unusable. Literally unusable: sometimes after opening it from a deeplink from Google, the app can't launch even after a force stop. It goes to a splash screen and calls itself "Popular" instead of Reddit, and the splash icon is some random community or user icon, and then crashes to home screen. No clearing cache gets you out of it, gotta clear data and sign in again. Not to mention, the horrible lag and slughishness.
They can't fix theirs so instead of competing fairly, they shut down the API so you have no other option.
I've never used the official app. I've seen screenshots of it.
The search functionality shouldn't be tied to the app, though. It's done server-side.
They’re probably going to try to use GPT to build a quick and dirty search engine