[decisiveness]

> Perhaps a site that's been around for over a decade and already has mass brand recognition might not get as many people googling it bare, since most people can just... go there directly.

It seems to me that googling for a popular site like reddit is actually pretty common. A couple of reasons:

1. Because google is often much better at returning relevant results for site:<site>.com <query> than searching for <query> in the site's search engine. I would think this to be the case even more so for types of sites like reddit simply because of such high total post / word count. In fact, brand recognition would seem to be more of a reason for people to google it. E.g. If you want to read a wikipedia article on some topic, you normally wouldn't visit wikipedia.org first to use its search, you'd google "wikipedia <topic>" or "site:wikipedia.org <topic>".

2. To avoid hitting enter after a typo and ending up on some malware site <domain with typo>.com.

[baddox]

Do people even use the site:reddit.com google query? If I want to search for something on reddit, I just search “something reddit” and the results are nearly always sufficient.

[oxide]

Yes. I use it for comment searching, you'd be surprised how useful it is for miscellaneous subject research. Then again I always try to use operators when applicable.