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.
Few reasons. Really good search is hard to do, which means expensive. Reddit probably doesn’t have the architecture in place to do a quality search. Not that the architecture couldn’t be changed, but it costs money. Another reason is that search engines exist. Why replicate the intricate details of a search engine when it’s not your core business? Especially when everyone can use the search engines to search Reddit.
I think companies just don’t prioritize internal search because search engines like Google work.
I don’t think it’s a technical hurdle. There are many libraries and tools available for a company to develop a decent internal search capability if they wanted to do so.
