Is this basically hosted Solr with some tweaks for speed and features?
For long periods of time I get "the service you request is temporarily unavailable. please try again later." on my home internet connection. From other boxes in the UK, it's fine and from friends on the same ISP, it's also fine. It's quite bizarre.
I'm pretty sure they are just having trouble dealing with the level of traffic they're getting.
I don't think it's a bad sign at all. Good search is HARD, and plenty of companies outsource it.
This said from someone who was part of a search startup acquired specifically to power a larger site that couldn't do a good job themselves.
You know what you're talking about, so I'll agree that you're right, but the simple action of searching titles of submissions on Reddit didn't work. That makes it seem like that there's something wrong with their code or database setup. Reddit's source code is pretty disgusting.
Not only that, he seems to be a top member of /r/jailbait reddit community.
Nice one.
