Not surprised, my personal browsing was almost entirely on mobile devices and 3rd party apps. My work browsing on computer is mainly for IT purposes and not logged in. Some subreddits are far better than the official support communities and they often come up early in google results.
To me it feels like search, Google etc, got a lot worse in the last few years but if you add "reddit" to your search you get good hits because reddit is like a thread archive where your specific problem has been discussed.
For that reason I will not be able to get rid of reddit completely and for some niche communities on there.
I hope there will be a critical mass on here soon so that this may even be bigger than reddit.
I came across my first instance of finding a solution on Reddit that’s been deleted. I support the user for doing it, but it’s also gonna make life a bit hard as that becomes more common.
Oh, for sure! Reddit was the only thing making Google searches tolerable. I have a feeling it's only going to get worse before it gets better. Lemmy seems to be growing rapidly though, so with any luck it'll become the go to site for searches.
In the meantime, have you heard of Archive.org? It's a giant archive of things on the internet, it's a phenomenal resource for deleted Reddit posts or comments (I've found that old.reddit links tend to work better because of how comments are loaded). Google's search cache is also handy (especially if no one thought to have the page you need archived, but Google keeps directing you to it). It's a fair bit faster than Archive.org and usually has what you're looking for if google directed you the the page, but it can be hit or miss for older content because it's less of an archive and more the last time the search engine looked at the page. CachedView.Com makes it super easy to check both and has been invaluable the last few weeks.