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Why is the search functionality on sites like Reddit, really low quality? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/experienced_devs

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I wanted to ask a technical questions, maybe high level, on why sites may have bad search and what the bottlenecks might be in almost never updating such in years. Was there something in the original development of the stack that is affecting progressive updates around the feature, how should one approach "Search" then in this case? Or is it simply a management issue.

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[–] coloredgrayscale 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For simplicity it probably just searches for posts containing all the words you typed, anywhere in the text and title of the post.

So a search for "table tennis" would match both "table tennis tournament" and "tennis Star looses temper, flips table at Dennis restaurant"

Likely exclusions for common "filler" worlds, like "the, and, is, a,"

Then the results get ordered by a score based on age, engagement / score

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s what I’ve been thinking. But more often than not I just don’t get any results where Google tends to find the exact posts with the same query. And I guess like others have said, they probably just depend on that. But yeah I felt a feature that is very important like this for Reddit not being fixed is interesting to me.

[–] Lmaydev 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google is way more advanced. It's doesn't just do a keyword search.

It does things like looking for similar words automatically., Looking at what other users clicked on after doing similar searches.

It can actually be frustrating when it includes things that are nothing to do with what you typed if your search is too specific.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

True, it would seem though, Google tackles a more complex problem, while Reddit or the like deals with its own specific data that has a predefined format that they know of.

Looking at what other users clicked on after doing similar searches. Yeah, I feel Reddit just doesn't account for these things, because requires way more work maybe to add as weights, if I am thinking of it correctly