The Verge's Jay Peters writes on the (temporary?) demise of one of the modern web's weirdest information structures: the use of the term "reddit" when searching Google to find useful human-written answers instead of the SEO garbage Google typically returns. Most of the relevant subreddits are shuttered to protest changes at Reddit designed to make it more appealing to investors, so the links lead to frustrating dead ends.
There's often a wealth of information all in one place, and since the best stuff is generally upvoted to the top, I can put trust in what bubbles up based on the community's response. However, now that many subreddits are planning to stay dark indefinitely, we might be dealing with largely useless links for a lot longer than expected. Granted, the Reddit trick for Google isn't completely broken. Many subreddits are functioning like normal, so you might have stumbled upon r/Games when looking for information on Starfield. Some switched to a more restricted format that lets you still read posts, like r/personalfinance. But in my day-to-day internet usage, I'm finding out just how often I used Google to search for things on Reddit
The more you zoom out, the more amazing and perverse the whole "Googling Reddit" phenomenon is. It depends on four things: Google Search being too enshittified to work without adding the term "reddit", Reddit's own search being plain useless1, Google not cutting it off, and Reddit continuing to host the general mass of people talking directly about things.
1. "Just use Reddit search" is often posed as a solution to the Googling Reddit phenomenon, but an example I just tried ("best cinematic camera") gets results about video games from Reddit's internal search. Googling Reddit, though, offers credible entry-level picks such as Sony's RX100, Panasonic's Lumix BS1H and the Blackmagic models: exactly the right answers for that kind of casual query.
