I'm not talking about inherent brokenness that was always there.
There is a specific search with a non-dictionary word, and limited to specific sub, that always worked, but it's not working right now, returning zero results. Reddit search is fully broken right now (except for finding sub names if you don't limit the search to a sub).
Problem is still persisting btw. And Reddit Status still reporting no problems.
Ironically, if they spent a lot of time improving it, Reddit might've been far more profitable. A big advantage Reddit has is all of the genuine conversation and questions for things people Google. Reddit could have weaponized it by becoming a direct competitor to Google, and I think they would've actually done really well.
Right? They could have done a billion things to become profitable, they're a top site for traffic for multiple countries. The fact that this is all they could muster just proves their incompetence.
I only use(d) it in a specific way. For example searching for a sport club (non-dictionary) name, limiting the search to that sport's sub, and sorting by new).
For general search, a search engine would indeed probably work much better.
Problem found and solved according to Reddit Status btw, and confirmed by my own tests.