This is indeed something Reddit does on their end, polluting the search index.
I'll note that the original results themselves are sometimes good, but:
- When I search in English with region Ukraine, translated Reddit results in Ukrainian, Russian, and sometimes absolutely random languages pop up, while the original un-translated result might be missing
- Even if I would use a redirect rule, the snippet is still machine translated, which is not good
It seems to me that the best solution is to discard all Reddit URL's with tl=xx in them as non-canonical and low quality.
It was mentioned here, and I noticed it too, that sometimes Kagi shows a translated snippet but the link leads to the canonical untranslated URL, without the tl=xx parameter. I am not 100% sure, but it might be something to do with Kagi's indexing or the earlier mitigation made for this problem. I think so because I can fetch the untranslated page reliably by removing the parameter, while also can reliably translate any Reddit discussion to any language by adding the said parameter. There is still a chance Reddit might be doing something special only to crawler requests, though I think it's unlikely.
Kagi is more positioned to be a search engine for people who know how to use search, and these people would know to search in multiple languages if they want to gather more perspectives. Of course regular consumers wouldn't do this very often, and it's a problem for a site like Reddit. But the problem Reddit tries to solve should be solved on the search engine end, if at all. E.g. Kagi could introduce multi-lingual search that would automatically look up the request in multiple languages and compile the results, this could be useful.
Steady Google Search quality decline and Reddit machine translated results pollution are the reasons why I'm fleeing to Kagi, and I hope the team finds a good solution to this problem while not hurting all search results coming from Reddit. I am losing any hope in Google Search team caring about the quality at all, since Google Search Central directly prohibits surfacing machine translated pages as original content, but Google's representatives discarded the problem when this concern was raised to them.
