Reddit Should Drop Everything to Work on Search

In the era of big tech, trust is monetizable

November 1, 2022

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Google search is dying.

If you want to find something worthwhile on Google, append the word "Reddit" to your query.

If you're doing this already, you know that it's because:

You don't want to be sold to by blogs that have mastered the search engine gaming system, or search engine optimization (SEO).
You want to hear from other people, not companies.
You'd rather just get the recipe, not the life story.

And you're not alone.

Michael Seibel from Twitch and Y Combinator tweeted:

Michael Seibel@mwseibel

A recent small medical issue has highlighted how much someone needs to disrupt Google Search. Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories.

On HackerNews, a commenter wrote, “Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.”

Paul Graham thinks that the increase in Google searches related to Reddit is because enough people are using Google for its Reddit content-scraping algorithm.

A poll of 3,000 Android power users found that 68% of them either sometimes or always include "Reddit" or "site:reddit.com" in their Google searches, with 14% saying they always do. A Hacker News post lambasting Google search is now the 11th most upvoted post from the programmer forum of all time.

While it's not yet apparent in Google's year-over-year revenue or their search statistics—and Google doesn't share daily search volume metrics—Google search is dying in the eyes of the tech-forward niches that brought it from nascency. There is a lack of trust that the results provided by the search engine are the best results for the user, instead of for the highest bidder or trickiest gamifier. The search engine's goals are no longer aligned—if they ever were—with the querier’s. Users are turning towards Reddit because it's easier to trust.

Why is it easier to trust Reddit than other places on the internet? One key reason is the hostility of both the platform and its community members to corporate engagement. Reddit is for Redditors, not companies who want to sell to Redditors. And we like it that way, of course.