> You’re missing the point - a popular sites own lack of internal search would explain the use of external search.
Sigh. The point is that 1) Google gives trash results by default 2) users know there are good results out there on the web, in particular on reddit 3) people append reddit to their google search query and suddenly good results start popping up 4) if google search wasn't trash by default, people would get good results without having to specifically direct the engine to reddit.
> People use Google to search Reddit because Reddit has terrible search.
Hey why don't you prove your assertion.
> Your other assertions would need to be proved more rigorously. Not just for Google, but for any search engine.
These are not my assertions. It's a claim the fine article is making. And they're not the only one making that claim. Anecdotally a lot of people are saying they do this to get useful results because Google results are trash.
I reckon the parent is correct about reddit having poor search capabilities. I often search for terms with site:stackoverflow.com as searching within stackoverflow consistently asks me to fill in a captcha challenge or gives poor results.
How about the metric in TFA?
> Reddit has even more garbage than Google.
Well, people disagree, and that's why they're searching reddit all the time now.
> Reddit search doesn’t even do basic spell correction.
You are missing the point.