One of the many ways Google has been desperately trying to maintain the usefulness of its increasingly shoddy core search product is by stuffing Reddit threads into as many search result pages as possible — a reaction, one supposes, to the way that users have responded to Google Search’s decline by affixing the word “Reddit” to their search queries. Do that, of course, and you zero in on insights from real people, as opposed to whatever garbage the Google Search algorithm decides to throw at you.
People do this also because Reddit itself is arguably a bit of a mess for the average person to sift through when they’re trying to find information — whether they’re looking for the best this, the latest news about that, or what real people are saying about, for example, products the user wants to buy. Fortunately, there’s a much simpler and, more importantly, cleaner way to find what you’re looking for on Reddit from among all the insightful posts and comments on the site, and it’s a tool called GigaBrain.
Similar to the way the hot new AI-based search tool Perplexity brings order to the chaos of Google Search, GigaBrain not only helps you quickly find the best comments and communities on Reddit in a clean and easy-to-use interface. You can also click on the GigaBrain tab after you install it on your computer to see what Redditors think about a product you’re looking at on Amazon.
GigaBrain scans billions of online discussions from Reddit but also other communities in order to help users find the most relevant and authentic information. If you have the tab installed, you can also invoke a GigaBrain search automatically whenever you add words like “Reddit,” “best,” and “forum” to your Google searches.
I’ll admit it: Anything that makes a site like Reddit easier to use while in the process doing an end-run around the almighty Google gets an automatic “yes” vote from me.
“The internet has been mainstream for over 30 years, but most human knowledge is still offline,” the GigaBrain team explains on the official website. “There are still questions that Google and ChatGPT can’t answer well. In way too many cases, Google searches return an endless list of crappy content farm blogs that feel totally untrustworthy. And ChatGPT, although great for coding questions or Wikipedia facts, isn’t ready to answer questions that seek experience-based or subjective information.
The site continues: “We’re building GigaBrain to help people find the most useful nuggets of info from other people. Our first launch makes it way easier to glean info from the billions of discussions on Reddit. We’ll keep adapting to become the best place to get real info from real people.”
