Dear Substack: Please Fix Your Search Engine
I thought it was discriminating against me, but actually it’s terrible at finding anything.
I posted my first Substack article on March 7, 2023. I was migrating away from Medium, on which I had posted many articles over the years, because Medium had started censoring my content without giving me specific reasons. Because I had several already-written articles to simply copy over, within one week I had thirteen articles posted on Substack.
I imagined that the best way for Substack readers to find me was via Substack’s own search engine, so I started searching for my own content using it. This was a curious experience. I’d enter search terms consisting of relatively rare words from my article titles, like “refutations” from my second title, and instead of finding my content, Substack’s engine seemed to desperately seek other titles with words that were lexically similar but not identical. For example, my “refutations” search would turn up titles containing words like reputation(s) and regulation(s), in a seemingly resolute attempt to avoid matching my search term precisely. Those few results containing the actual word (again, “refutations”) were articles from years ago, often where the word didn’t appear in the title or was perhaps incidental to the article’s topic.
I went back and forth with Substack’s support people, who were very gracious and who assured me that over time and with more subscriptions my articles would rise in the search results. But alas it is now mid-April, I have much more content and many more subscribers, yet the search results don’t seem to have changed. It finally dawned on me that the results aren’t going to change. The problem isn’t the newness of my material; the problem is that the Substack search engine delivers really poor results for everyone and everything.
The kicker came when I added an article containing the proper name “Soros” in its title. I gave the engine a few days to digest my new material, and then tried searching on “Soros”. The search engine ranked articles containing these terms:
· somos
· sorts
above articles whose titles or content contained “Soros”. Then came some exact matches, none of which was my article. Then came matches on:
· more of the above (somos and sorts)
· solos
· sores
· toros
It seems really odd that a search engine would assign a higher rank to many articles not matching this rather specific proper name than it would to my article containing the precise name.
My final dispatch to the Substack service folks on this subject was this:
There are billions of potential Substack readers in the world, and you'll need a lot of authors to reach any significant fraction of them. Your writers need all the help they can get. When an already-established celebrity becomes a Substack author, the quality of your search engine is probably immaterial; that person's followers will follow him/her around. Your big challenge with celebrities is to snag them.
But unknown authors like me are, well, unknown. Right now, Substack is losing money hosting my "free" content. I'd love to have paid subscribers, but it would be preposterous for me to require payment when I'm already having trouble getting readers to read for free. I need some sort of staircase where I can step up my readership gradually to the point where I could even contemplate producing paid content.
I spend a lot of time posting links to my articles as comments on others' social media posts (where the topic is appropriate). But my best source of new readers should probably be existing Substack readers. Substack readers, especially new ones, probably use Substack's own search engine when searching for content. My guess is that most such users have not yet realized that Substack's engine produces mostly nonsensical results, and that they'll never find most of what they're seeking by using it.
SO ... from my perspective, probably the most important thing that Substack could do to enhance its readership, including its paid readership, is to replace Substack's search engine with something that works.
So there you have it. What say, Substack? Can we have a new search engine? Thanks!
Yup. I'm considering jumping on Substack and so used their search to check out my niche. It was horrendous. It didn't return ANYTHING under the words I was searching (tantra, yoga, tantrik yoga). I'm thinking, surely SOMEONE is writing about those topics on Substack? So then I use Duck Duck Go Search engine to specifically search Substack for those topics... and start getting all kinds of results.
So you're bang on the money. Substack's internal search is horrendous.
I found this article using Duck Duck Go... because I wanted to find out if anyone else was having trouble with Substack's search engine... you've answered that question for me. Thank you!
You've got great content!
I've also been censored in Medium and Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.
Problem: if any of those comes with a buying offer to Substack, we're done!
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