Ask HN: Why does Reddit search suck so much?

Maybe you think it sucks, but it's still much better than no search at all. Looking at you HN.

Well, TIL. Thanks.

It is provided by YC Company Algolia. Many YC companies leverage the software provided by other YC companies.

If you were a one of the first YC companies and you're core business was to aggregate, curate and influence the development of content. And you weren't able to develop a core service, hypothetically something like search. Maybe you could buy that service from some other company; like Algolia.

Potentially, it would work the same way as HN does. The site they cloned when they pivoted.

In general, people are trained by Google to expect a lot out of a search. On Google you can phrase a search in a number of ways that don't precisely map to how the ideal content phrases it, and still figure it out. This works because Google has a massive amount of data - data from searches about what words are generally synonyms of other words, data from other pages on the internet that link to the target page, and data about what past searchers have done.

When you do a site-specific search, or a search on an internal corporate site, much of this data is often totally absent. So it may just not be possible to build a search with as high a quality as you expect, on that corpus, with modern technology.

Source: I don't know anything about Reddit search specifically but I was formerly a search expert and I am pretty sure this is what's going on here.

Thank you ! Also http://vis.searchreddit.net to visualize search results.

Also http://searchhn.com for a realtime hacker news search. All of these demos are being rebuilt from scratch and hopefully will be out in a week.