Forget Medium’s new logo, let’s talk about its crap search

Have you ever tried to search Medium? Womp, womp.

I understand that many Medium writers are concerned about the platform’s recent changes. The articles I’ve seen have primarily been a litany of complaints about the awful new logo and how other new changes will affect writers’ visibility and income. But, honestly, Medium has bigger problems.

As an active Medium writer and contributor, I’m far more concerned about how hard it is to search the Medium platform.

Imagine that you want to write about a specific topic. Before you do that, you may want to see what others have already published. Or perhaps you’ve written a new article and want to find a publication that might publish it.

For a publishing platform that says it wants to encourage usage and promote its writers, Medium is doing an appallingly bad job, even when it comes to providing the most basic search capabilities.

Case in point: this morning, I woke up to an NYTimes article saying that the Justice Department has filed an antitrust suit against Google. If you want to find the article, copy the previous sentence, and paste it into Google.

Want to find articles about the Google antitrust lawsuit on Medium? Good luck.

When I tried typing “NYTimes article that said the Justice Department had accused Google of violating antitrust laws” into Medium’s search bar, I came up empty-handed.

Next, I tried removing unnecessary words. When I searched for “Google violating antitrust laws,” I found one article from yesterday.

As I removed more and more words, finally whittling my query down to “Google antitrust,” the results only got worse. The top result was dated July 2017.

Tag Search Isn’t Any Better.

Next, I tried searching by tags: Antitrust, Google, and Monopoly. The tag search results? Garbage.

Okay, I thought, maybe no one on Medium is writing about Google antitrust. But before I gave up, I tried one of my favorite search hacks using Google:

Type “medium.com: google antitrust”.

Boom! Google Searches Medium Better than Medium Does

There it was: pages and pages of Medium articles about Google’s antitrust woes, including recent results from top Medium publications, including OneZero and Marker.

For even better results, try the same search in Google News. Use the advanced search tools to refine your search by date, relevance, and more.

I understand that part of Medium’s charm is its simplicity. The emphasis is on publishing content rather than building a platform so bloated with search features that it’s like shopping on Amazon.

Now, however, with Medium’s accelerating growth, coupled with an unprecedented demand for digital content, one would think that providing a passable search experience would rank higher in their platform development priorities.

As for Google and the antitrust case.

Spoiler alert: Google will win.

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Sean Smith is a proud dad and digital marketer who tends to write about thought leadership, coffee, Italy, life, digital content, LGBT stuff, and the ROI of being nice.