because reddit could never get their search engine working no matter how many times they tried it

In their defense, writing a good search engine is very hard, even if you own all the data yourself.

There’s a good reason why the litte search bar on reddit, on every forum ever created and on every corporate website is basically useless.

It’s also why, among other minor technological challenges (like caching and indexing the entire fediverse), there is no search engine for Lemmy. Nor will there likely ever be one. Which is actually a pitty, because finding valuable information in a comment stashed on some minor instance will be nearly impossible - even for google.