I’ve been doing something on Google quite a lot lately, and I’ve come to find out it’s part of a larger trend. When I search for something, say “best electric lawnmower”, I’ll stick the word “reddit” at the end of it and search for “best electric lawnmower reddit” instead. The results are tremendously better.
You may not really understand or care what Reddit is, but it’s essentially a massive forum full of people talking about things; almost literally everything. By adding it to your search, rather than getting search results from the best SEO-focused sites, you get discussions from real people. In many cases, that’s exactly what you wanted in the first place.
A post from DKB earlier this year summed it up very well:
The SEO marketers gaming their way to the top of every Google search result might as well be robots. Everything is commercialized. Someone’s always trying to sell you something. Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.
So how can we regain authenticity? What if you want to know what a genuine real life human being thinks about the latest Lenovo laptop?
You append “reddit” to your query (or hacker news, or stack overflow, or some other community you trust).
This isn’t the best move for many things, but a lot of times it’s a huge help when searching.
I hope Google is able to improve results for all queries as time goes on, but for now, for many searches, just stick “reddit” in there and you’ll likely find the commentary that you’re looking for.
