In the meantime, some of us still use Google to search Reddit, hence https://redditle.com
Or for some of us, because Google's results are increasingly filled with clickbait, "reddit" has been a cheatcode to navigate that. Redditle is for you too!
Is it the same as Googling "site:reddit.com"? Yes :D
Redditle also supports searching in a specific subreddit with "r/<subreddit>" e.g. "r/webdev guide to vue" would search in r/webdev.
Did you know that "Redditle" literally means either "with Reddit" or "Reddit it" in Turkish depending on context and is actually the perfect Turkish name for a service that does something using Reddit?
As a similar example, Turkish for "Google it" is "Google'la". To google is "Google'lamak".
PS: The suffixes le/la are the same, vowels in suffixes generally adapt to the word that the get attached to due to vowel harmony.
Top threads in Reddit are often contrived too: comments and recommendations mimicking real flow, just like fraudulent scientific studies fill the framework to look legit and where the layperson, and even scientists who aren't great with understanding statistics will believe it - and which media easily will promote as clickbait, making it a popular "truth" that the masses get familiarized with even if a shallow and incorrect conclusion is propagated.
Just want to say that I love this - I'm the exact target for it! I had considered doing something similar as a TUI, but my lazy ass never got around to it :)
nice! I use that quite often, so it might come handy. Quick question, how did you build that ? Does Google provide any sort of API or did you build a web scraper for that ?
Congratulations to you for the release. It looks great. For most of the queries I get that the server is overwhelmed. Probably HN hug of death.
I would look into the Reddit trademark situation. I am pretty sure reddit only allows apps and websites to use "for Reddit" and no other name combinations with their name.
I find the Duck Duck Go !bang things to be pretty comprehensive, easy to memorize. Just leaving my default engine as ddg and can get github, archwiki, reddit, google maps, npm, hacker news search very quickly
Or you can spend a few minutes configuring things locally to bypass a middle man, an additional HTTP redirect, and save a keystroke (!) or more since you can define your own shorter shortcuts. Privacy, performance, and convenience improved at the same time.
I have a ton of these set up in Firefox which used to work seamlessly on mobile until they ruined it in the disaster of a rewrite, and now they don't plan to bring it back at all in favor of some replacement system that's still not done yet.
No, he's talking about the OP, whose site needs to intercept all your search queries in order to provide the highly valuable service of adding "site:reddit.com" for you.
yeah they call them web shortcuts and you can make custom ones, and customize the resulting generated URL stucture based on the text entered into krunner, it's a really nice feature in KDE
Protip for Firefox users: you can create your own custom search engines for any website by simply creating a new bookmark of the form "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+site:reddit.com" and set the bookmark keyword to whatever prefix you prefer e.g. "r". This config will let me search reddit by typing "r vuejs" my Firefox's address bar
For DuckDuckGo users, you can just use a !bang. !r for searching on Reddit directly, !sr to go to a specific subreddit, !searchr for searching Reddit through DDG, and !greddit for searching Reddit through Google.
Though there's some risk of it going away in an upcoming patch, you can also use JavaScript and do pretty much anything you want in a bookmarklet keyword, creating very powerful "advanced searches" for yourself. I have a few examples outlined here - https://river.me/blog/firefox-keep-bookmark-keywords/#bookma...
This is amazing. I've been using DDG mostly for the bangs and really wished there was a way to add custom bangs (I suggested them to DDG, but never got a response). This is just what i needed.
That's what i meant by suggesting a bang. The bang was the equivalent of `!dictionary`, but in my native language. I guess not enough people here use DDG for it to be considered.
This isn’t really relevant anymore, but even Internet Explorer had that feature ("SearchUrl") since IE3 in 1996. While not well-known, it’s a must-have browser feature IMO.
You can do the same on chrome: right click on the url bar → manage search engines → set a keyword to the prefix you prefer and the url with %s for the search term in the same way.
xSearch for Safari is great for this on Mac and iOS. I've made a bunch of custom !bang search engines on top of those supported by DuckDuckGo. It really speeds up research on various databases.
I've been working on a browser extension called More Rich Results that you might find useful.
It just looks for Reddit and Stack Exchange results and previews them in the sidebar. It makes for a pretty clean search experience when developing or looking for opinions.
It has definitely improved my workflow and a lot more features are planned such as Github repo/issue previews and support for Searx. It currently works with Google and DuckDuckGo, although it is still in the early stages.
Hackernews' Algolia search function is also a wealth of information. Basically any useful site (& comment) you can imagine is stored there, if you care to look. It's almost too good to be true, but you have to be in a serendipitous mindset to dive into certain topics, and also have something precious to us all: time. There's rabbit-holes on certain topics where I genuinely don't have the time to delve any further.
Like lately I wanted to learn about Go and was just floored at how much documentation and snippets of code I could use in my first project, so I just gave up. There are things I want to learn, but don't have the dedication & discipline to set aside 5 hours to make those initial first steps.
This is why I double down on topics I am currently proficient at, and when I find something that can go exponential the more time I spend on it, the better it is for me. Build on strength.
Also useful, for example, if you want to be the one in charge of whether your browser uses the desktop version of Wikipedia rather than the mobile one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org -> https://en.wikipedia.org
Redirect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org(\/.\\*)?
to: https://en.wikipedia.org$1
If you have a Reddit account no extensions are needed to fix this.
Just go to your Reddit account settings[0] and click "Opt out of the redesign" at the bottom. (Or on old Reddit you uncheck "Use new Reddit as my default experience"). Once you do this you'll now see old Reddit on www.reddit.com.
The best thing about this is other people don't need "old.reddit.com" to "new.reddit.com" redirector extensions. Reddit assumes if you put "old." or "new." then you explicitly want to override your account's preferences.
I will note that this setting occasionally "unsticks" and you start getting the new one again... I assume that's a purposeful "feature" to see if they can cleave off some people who now tolerate it or don't notice.
https://reddit.com/prefs is similar but not actually the same page and, conversely, this old page will only load with the old interface regardless of your preference as it doesn't exist in the new interface.
I think regression isn't saying it directly enough. Reddit purposefully sabotages their own mobile site to entice you to install a data slurping app on your phone.
Don't even bother with reddit on mobile; you really need an app. I've been through a lot of reddit apps and Boost is the best IMO. Everything just works, and useful gestures that I usually don't trigger by accident.
On some posts on mobile I get an overlay telling me to either create an account, or view r/popular, with no choice to view the post I found via search. If you do sign in you get 2, sometimes 3 consecutive popups to use their app. They definitely don't care about the mobile web experience except as a means to market their app
Reddit is a psychopath organisation. Strong words, but if you've ever followed a Google link to a Reddit page on mobile, then you would understand that no-one could accidentally build such an abhorrent experience, it is deliberate evil.
New reddit is also a shitshow on mobile. Load the page (which takes a while) dismiss the prompt to get the app, continue browsing, click Load More in comments, try to dismiss the login prompt, fail, give up and leave. On desktop new reddit scrolls all the way to the top when you Ctrl+click links in comment threads, it's a mess. I usually use libreddit.
Mostly my problem with it is that it's buggy: frequently clicking a thread or comment chain doesn't actually load, but scrolls the screen as if it did, and other similar annoyances.
On mobile particularly if logged out (or particularly particularly if in a private browsing mode) it's quite aggressive about trying to push you to the app, or letting you view only a couple comments in a thread before saying you're not allowed to see more, or not letting you view some subs at all. "Old" reddit doesn't do any of this.
It's not buggy, it's deliberately written to be so annoying that you have no choice but to install the Reddit app. Reddit is a grotesque company, which for some reason gets a free pass for their abhorrent dark patterns.
I've noticed an increased amount of search hijacking related to "reddit" these days. The results are flooded with results such as these when I search for "axiom trekk reddit":
that's easily fixed by googling "blah blah site:reddit.com"
The real problem is how to get better results now that reddit's site has changed. I often see posts from even 10 years show as having activity from within a few years or even days on google. The reddit redesign has been a horrible detriment to the website
If you're using it for product research, probably not the best idea - I'm betting that people who append site:reddit.com to their queries are not the only ones who've noticed it being a better place to find information sometimes... marketers will, if not, already have, heavily infiltrated popular subreddits, especially to manufacture consensus on good products.
The killer feature for me would be time filter. Google doesn't work because the dates listed on the results never match the date of the original post. For example, something posted 7 years ago will be marked as posted recently on Google. I assume this is some SEO bullshit that Reddit is pulling.
I've posted about this a lot as I use site:reddit.com extensively.
>For example, something posted 7 years ago will be marked as posted recently on Google.
I've noticed this too. I think Google Search is updating the page's timestamp in the search cache every time anything changes on the page itself. So if the sub's admins change any content that displays on every page in the sub, like the rules/guidelines section or stickies a post for example, Google Search is considering it a page update even if the post itself is old.
If there's one thing google needs to very very heavily penalize in their page rank algorithm, it's websites that outright lie about date. It makes the entire search process unusable for tons of queries, even more so than if they just didn't display any date.
If that's impossible they should at least keep track of page history independently of what the page itself says. Especially when it's very obviously just done to cheat the algo. There's no way for an archived 7 year old reddit article to actually change, and honestly even in an active post I don't see any reason for updating the timestamps.
founder of Breeze where our core thesis is searching by date, and yeah, it's a massssssssssssssive problem. there's only so much we can do for queries we support that are serviced by other indexes, we're adding an archive compare for queries where we're doing the indexing along with the query and even in that situation, yeah, it's just a lot of work and again only so much can do
> For example, something posted 7 years ago will be marked as posted recently on Google.
This has been frustrating me to no end.
Te results on Google will show the reddit posts with dates within the last 6-12 months for the posts, then when I click into the post it was actually made 3-4 years ago.
There will be "<Post title - reddit.com> - 05/05/21", then you click that link, and the post was actually made 7 years ago, with the last comment being 7 years ago.
I add 'forum' to my question. I don't think Reddit is a good site to answer my questions.
Lot more specialized forums with more in depth info.
The only topic I use reddit for is politics.
Maybe I'm different, but for me, reading about politics it's important to read about opinions that differ from mainstream and might not be accepted everywhere, to challenge my own opinions. And the format of "upvoted content at the top" really works against that. Traditional forums where the format is "oldest content at the top" works much better for it. I've found technical content (where facts are just facts) works much better with the reddit model (and HN).
I don't use Reddit, and haven't found it terribly interesting. Why would somebody want to use it as a primary source of truth?
Wikipedia? Sure. StackOverflow? Sometimes.
I occasionally prefer Quora links, only because I'm active there and there's a chance I'll know the person (and thus have some faith in their answer). Is it something like that?
> Why would somebody want to use it as a primary source of truth?
Not everything is about truth or untruth. Some things are opinions, and some opinions are worse than others. Some are just spam.
Search engines have been absolutely destroyed by blog spam. Look up info on new hardware? Dozens of amazon referral blog spam. Look up information about hobbies? Dozens of blog spam trying to either sell you something or get ad revenue. Look up an obscure thought about something civil in nature? A mix between thousand page government docs that I don't know how to navigate, a few dozen irrelevant "news" articles, and more blog spam.
At least with reddit I can usually find something that is not blog spam, and I'm generally familiar with the biases of various subs. It's far from perfect, but I don't know anything better in the general case.
If I search for a Windows problem on Google, I'll get tons of long generic content that contains very basic advice and lots of steps. They look like hastily-written tech sites with lots of ads that try to win with SEO.
If I search with `site:reddit.com`, I get actual users discussing their problem and what solutions they've tried.
It’s a result of the avalanche of SEO crap results that you normally get in Google searches. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are good too, but don’t always have the information you’re looking for. My top 4 resources are GitHub, Wikipedia, Reddit, and StackOverflow.
Reddit is a catch-all for communities nowadays, where you can generally find authentic questions and answers to most common problems and discussions about most common topics.
Personally I trust (some parts of) Reddit far more than Quora, where the content seems to be largely SEO/marketing crap and not authentic.
Reddit does have the same SEO/marketing crap content, to be sure, but it has a lot of authentic content too, and I find it’s generally easy to tell what is what.
I guess for me it boils down to authenticity being more important than authority or expertise, because one of the largest problems with the web today is inauthentic content, content where the author has an ulterior motive.
Straight up Google results are too manipulated by machine generated blogs for SEO. Google "best x" you would end up in a blog post made of Amazon affiliate links. Same goes for product reviews, it's impossible to find blogs that cover reviews on everyday products barring a few.
Reddit has become a gold mine for some when it comes to product reviews and research. "Give a man a mask, he will tell you the truth" - with quora your identity being associated some hesitate on stark opinions but with reddit, you can do whatever you want to say and the community takes care of it with upvotes and karma.
Recently there has been an influx of paid reviews and opinions everywhere, yt comments, Amazon reviews and even reddit comments. So take everything with a truckload of salt but given the limited content I have to source, reddit is as good as it gets. Someone should build yt comments extractor and search on top of that.
I use it to get a more informed idea of products I'm thinking about buying. For example if I'm looking up a specific pair of headphones I'll usually read around on there to see what people think of them.
This. Yesterday I was looking for a pc case and google showed only irrelevant results for x vs y. Typing reddit, bam instant discussions about the topic even with more useful information.
For me it is good to find an honest discussion of a thing (e.g. tool, tv series) rather than whatever paid-for article or review which would otherwise appear first.
It can be the most reliable place to find a group of real people all knowledgeable about the same thing. So things like “best weekend itinerary in x city”.
Well, there are definitely shill accounts on reddit, but not enough to ruin the site. And the whole point of the site is to argue with people, so I guess it should be possible to, at least sometimes, tell if something is up.
Hah, you got me. Reddit content is efficient to browse (old reddit UI), has multiple POVs, and upvotes is a decent heuristic for determining answer quality.
Random websites on the other hand... If i'm looking for a recipe, why do I have to read several paragraphs about what you did last Tuesday? Anecdotal preambles are the worst.
I built a desktop browser extension version (100% open source and GPL licensed) of this basic idea or side searching filtered to some sites only. It also just uses your browser's default search engine (so you can stick to DuckDuckGo for example). Usually I don't like to plug on HN but thought this is uniquely relevant.
It shows reddit (also HN, and others when relevant) filtered results in a sidebar for Google queries. It's auto expanded when there's a non-navigational query with no onebox (this is a increasingly becoming a good indicator of when Google is lacking decisiveness in a query).
The problem, is that Google often serves up old reddit threads as new due to some bug in "search by date" feature. You end up with 10-year-old reddit threads showing up having a date from 7 days ago.
Thanks everyone for the HN hug of death on this little side project of mine! It's been crazyyyy. And if it's okay I also just wanted to give a small shout out to my other project at https://catche.co - we've got about 30 people on that waitlist, check it out!
I think you might want to make the 'Learn More' stand out against the white background. I didn't see it at all and almost closed the tab until I noticed it.
Google used to have a feature called Discussions Search that would search forums for results. That allowed you to get discussion results from any forum. Since Google killed it, it's impossible to get discussion results unless you focus on Reddit.
I wonder how much this has contributed to Reddit crowding out other discussion forums.
I tend to append or prepend site:forum.* to my searches to emulate this missing feature. Not every forum is set up with this url but it's better than nothing
Assuming this is just for fun and not an attempt at an actual business, why not just forward the user to www.google.com/search?q=my_query after appending "+site:Reddit.com" or whatever? This could be done with a statically served 1kb HTML file with no server otherwise required to handle requests.
Ahh this is actually a really really good point - I just pulled this out of my butt today as a fun coding project haha but what you described would be a much smarter way to do it. Less fun though! Oh well I'll just leave this up, I'm guessing the traffic will probably die down after awhile.
PS. FireFox (latest) didn't recognize it as a search engine. I can't add it to my search engines. It would be nice if this is something you can update on the backend side.
I smiled while reading this item :) I knew I am not the only one doing this but wouldn't have guessed it as common practice.
P.s. I will not use the service, showing that I insist on typing the additional word every time is my way of saying:
1. I don't want Google to return anything else
2. Reddit developers can't implement search correctly.
I notice not all results have a date. That is extremely important when looking at Reddit posts, and one of the main issues with Google because old posts will show up as new.
Which subreddit the result is found on is inconsistent - it's in some titles, in others not. So it doesn't really stand out and oftentimes that's an important piece of information.
The subreddit could be listed on its own line. Perhaps something like:
I get a blank screen with a 500 and some JS errors every time.
POST https://4781toi2w8.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/default/redditle-search 500
Error: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'match')
at index.0dca874d.js:5:25633
TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'length')
at Proxy.Yu (index.0dca874d.js:5:28261)
Looks great! sorry to see that the API isn't quite working with all the traffic though.
I actually build the same thing a few weeks back: https://searchbettr.com but it redirects instantly to a Google search so you don't have to deal with the API.
Reddit should be removed from Google. It is not possible to view a Reddit page using a mobile browser. Google indexes webpages using an emulated mobile device. Therefore there should be zero pages in the Google index.
Love this, but just stopped working for me. Did an initial search and got lots of results, came back and reloaded the page to “No results found :(“. Same issue from new window.
Nice! In many instances for me searching through subreddits is the only way to go. Did not realize a lot of us do it. Not sure it warrants a new domain though.
AMP[1] is a (somewhat maligned) Google 'standard' which encourages a 'thin' version of sites with minimal assets and fast load times so that Google can display them in a sort of iframe-like context without the user actually having to leave the Google site (part of why it's maligned). Most site's AMP versions are lightweight and bypass any login/paywall because they want Google to show the rich results of this page. I'm guessing this person is interested in you using the AMP versions of Reddit which may be lighter, zippier, and not require login. I'm not sure if it's possible for a third party to display an AMP page the way Google does, though -- maybe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When the internet has been so comercialized that in order to gain credible information you have to go to a place where you KINDA trust people dont have ulterior motives.
Who would give a damn about socialist censorship when you have a better alternative: a capitalist internet?
Oh could you give it a try now? I just woke up and got around to fixing some of the scaling issues - it's not perfect but at least it's only failing 5% of queries when I load-tested with locust. Will get around to better fixes later!
Reddit search isn't great (https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/lucx82/w...). But it's improving! (https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/t9nuaz/whats_up_wit...)
In the meantime, some of us still use Google to search Reddit, hence https://redditle.com
Or for some of us, because Google's results are increasingly filled with clickbait, "reddit" has been a cheatcode to navigate that. Redditle is for you too!
Is it the same as Googling "site:reddit.com"? Yes :D
Redditle also supports searching in a specific subreddit with "r/<subreddit>" e.g. "r/webdev guide to vue" would search in r/webdev.
GitHub repo - https://github.com/greentfrapp/redditle