The English results are pretty good from what I’ve seen. Hit and miss in some areas though, like if you want to search in quotes.
Simple searches in other languages seem to work OK. It might depend on the language though. Google does better overall.
I noticed the same thing. I was on Reddit for a good 12 years and the quality was getting worse for years, but it’s really dropped off since May 30. There are noticeably fewer big posts on r/all and there’s hardly any new or interesting stuff. It’s reposts, Twitter screenshots, stuff from Tiktok and Discord, complaints (think mildlyinfuriating, AITA, Doordash), and rate me requests. And Facebook type things, like “here’s what my kids did today.” The bright spots in the sea of trash are gone.
Kbin, Lemmy, and Tildes have been filling up with the good stuff I missed from Reddit. A month ago, it was a little slow here, but not anymore.
I dusted off my Feedly account. You can follow up to 100 publications for free. For me, that’s more than enough to get the main U.S. and world headlines, plus a few special interests. I like to sort by Popular + Latest or just latest.
You can sort by Most Popular if you pay $6 a month. I never felt a need to try that. The free version is easy to use, looks nice, and keeps me informed. Hot stories are marked with green text and a green arrow, so they’re pretty easy to spot.
I set it up years ago. Just added every newspaper or news site I could think of, plus whatever looked interesting from r/worldnews and a few other subreddits.
I think your posts must just show up in the sort if your instance is federated with ours. I found this in m/random on Kbin. I just came to see if the spam was gone and I could unblock. This post was number 6 under hot. If I had to guess, the number of comments probably pushed it up. The posts around it have more upvotes but less comments.