"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."

"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."

"You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads."

"What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search."

"he results keep getting ""refined"" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries."

"They are probably testing/already implemented some sort of multi armed bandit type optimization like on Youtube's search results where they just show any popular pages (ignoring relevancy) to see if they yield a click."

"Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam?"

"It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines. The founders of Google pointed this out themselves when they were just getting started."

"we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"

"Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”"

"To be fair, this would probably be an issue with any search engine, but you’d expect Google to be able to come up with a less gameable algorithm."

"The SEO marketers gaming their way to the top of every Google search result might as well be robots."

"You append “reddit"" to your query (or hacker news, or stack overflow, or some other community you trust)."