This week, a blog post entitled âGoogle Search Is Dyingâ went viral, detailing how the search results have deteriorated because of the proliferation of advertisements and SEO sites.
Hereâs an excerpt from DKB:
If youâve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I donât need to tell you that Google search results have gone to sât. You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO-optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.
Google still gives decent results for many other categories, especially when it comes to factual information. You might think that Google results are pretty good for you, and you have no idea what Iâm talking about.
What you donât realize is that youâve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search. You already know subconsciously that Google isnât going to return a good result.
DKB asserts that Reddit is now the most popular search engine. And this claim is not unfounded. Reddit has become one of the most prominent social platforms, a rare place on the internet where you can find an answer to any problem you have, like my recent one: âDog won't stop trying to eat grass and completely tunes me outâ and get answers to that same question âdogs eat grass when they feel sick or have upset stomachsâ. As pointed out by Paul Graham, Reddit has grown into a social platform of sorts that has not yet reached its peak.
But Reddit goes beyond being just a Q&A search-social-platform; itâs a place where communities congregate, itâs a news aggregator for 7 out of 10 Reddit users*, and itâs a place from which MIT and Harvard derived their research on mental health** recently. Sources( *pew research center, **websitebuilder)
But... searching Reddit is kind of hard, unnecessarily hard.
For all the great things that Reddit offers, Reddit users often complain that they are having a hard time finding what they are looking for using the siteâs search functionality.
âReddit search not workingâ is a popular SERP query that looks like this:
That query above has an average daily search volume of 1.4K, and when combined with related keyword searches such as âreddit search brokenâ, âreddit wonât searchâ, etc., it has amounted to roughly 8.6M total volume of searches on that topic as of January 29, 2022 (source semrush.com keyword volume analysis).
But perhaps even more importantly, it frustrates Reddit users, who take to the platform and leave comments like these:
So how do people actually search Reddit?
As DKB notes, since Redditâs search functionality isnât up to par, more people have resorted to appending âsite:reddit.comâ to Google and bypass the ads and SEO to get straight to real people's comments on Reddit. It might sound counter-intuitive, but it works, well kind of.
Although somewhat effective in finding relevant results, the process itself is time-consuming. You are often met with a long line of links to go through and a very little preview of the results to help you determine if you should or shouldnât click on a specific result to read it further.
Good news - Google is not the only search engine out there, despite its efforts to monopolize the market. A search engine like you.com automatically integrates Reddit into its results, giving instant access to Reddit on every query without having to append âsite:reddit.comâ each time.
On you.com, you can even set your source preferences. The search engine will always surface relevant results, but it prioritizes those results based on your preferences such as Reddit. With an account, you can set that preference with a thumbs up. If you want to see less of something, give it a thumbs down, and if youâre indifferent, there is no need to do anything. Whatâs also unique about it is that it gives you a preview of each Reddit post so you can quickly scan and see if itâs in line with what you are looking for. Swiping left and right takes you to more similar content while swiping up and down lets you see different types of results and different sources of content â all in the same tab, saving you time.
This video walks you through the platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR9sNOMB6yI
Itâs also important to mention that you.com search results donât include ads and wonky SEO content. Unlike standard search engines, you.com doesnât sell usersâ private data to advertisers in personal or private mode. And in the private mode, nothing is stored, making it more private than any other search engine out there.
So next time you want to search Reddit like a detective, skip the traditional search engines and go straight to You.com to find what you are looking for. Spend less time searching, and find more of what you want. Youâll quickly find why Reddit is so loved by YOUsers and why itâs one of the most used search apps on you.com right now.
Try it out at you.com, and let us know what you think in the comments below.
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