#15 Is Google letting you down? Use Reddit
As of March 2023, Google commands 93% of the online search market.
When hunting for information we often ‘Google it’ without giving much thought to alternative means of searching – even if we still can’t find exactly what we want.
But there is another way: Reddit.
For readers who haven’t come across it before, the website describes itself as “a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions.”
Reddit is divided into subreddits – enclaves focused on threads or categories where people discuss specific topics.
The beauty of Reddit is the users tend to be highly invested in their areas of interest and attribute a lot of value to authenticity, accuracy and expertise.
Information gleaned from Reddit is often superior to the first pages of search results from Google.
The thing we need to keep in mind with Google is that while it is a phenomenal, powerful tool and the top pages might offer organic, useful answers to our searches – it also shows us the websites with the best SEO that might not be exactly what we want to find or pages that are commercially driven not user driven.
On the other hand, the issue with Reddit is that its search tool lets it down.
The way around this is to use both, tapping into the superior search functionality of Google but turning its attention to Reddit’s rich bank of knowledge.
Enter ‘Reddit.com:’ followed by your search terms or topic of interest into Google and it will search only in Reddit and yield results drawn from there instead.
You can use this approach for any website to craft surgical searches of specific domains.
Like these Dispatch posts?
Join my newsletter community and receive the Sunday Roundup where I collect and curate them for readers once per week. You'll also receive full access to all my blogs and free resources.
Benjamin Craske
Member discussion