Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.

Paul Graham thinks this image means Reddit as a social media site “still hasn’t peaked”. What it actually means is that the amount of people using Reddit as a search engine is growing.

  • KapowOPM
    link
    fedilink
    22 years ago

    I thought it was an interesting indicator of what the Lemmy federation could become. People are putting reddit on the end of their searches to see real peoples thoughts.

    We are building communities of real people, so I thought this was a good omen for organic search traffic in the future.

    • Masterofballs
      link
      fedilink
      1
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      It works really well as a search engine. Search wolfballs for covid news and you get all the results google censors because we posted and upvoted throughout the last year of the pandemic all the things big tech was hiding.

      The problem as these platforms grow is dealing with bots. Reddit is mostly bot traffic these days. A front page promotion of a product or idea is worth a lot of money.

      Bots get super sophisticated as the space becomes more valuable.

      People make entire careers on getting to the front page of google.