I think !reddit just sends you directly to reddit and uses reddit’s search engine, which has been infamously bad. Has that changed? It doesn’t seem to be quite the same as appending “reddit” to queries to search for reddit posts, but using better search engines.
Honestly, reddit’s search engine is okay, but yeah it doesn’t get as exact as standard search engines because I think it prioritizes keywords from the post title over comments and also prioritizes most recent posts over subject relevance. That said, the old reddit posts are still going to be accessible via standard not google search engines.
I’ll admit this is somewhat of a bandaid fix, as should reddit keep this deal with google going, eventually this workaround will prove less effective than it currently is.
This workaround just gets you the newest posts related to your query, and otherwise, for older posts, the search term reddit in search engines is still superior. So I don’t know, it’s the best solution I can think of for now.