One long-term solution would be to ask the relevant question in a relevant community on lemmy every time this happens to you. Then answer it yourself (or wait for other to), perhaps using the other site (via archive.org) as a reference when writing it up.
The important bit is to make sure the answer here is complete and not just a link to outside sources. That way it won't disappear if those other sites go offline.
With enough people doing this we can push lemmy into those search results and build a useful & independent repository of knowledge.
Not just with subs going private, but with users purging their comments and posts along with their accounts. Just last night I was talking to a friend about something and wanted to pull up a post from a while back. Lo and behold, deleted and gone.
all attention to this mess is good imho. also remember chat gpt was trained on reddit data i until fall 2021 so should be able to pull on archived zeitgeist for a quick and dirty answer
I wonder if they could shift to showing cached versions of pages, so that data is still accessible externally, but you can't interact or get to it from reddit.
It was a terrible place to get info. Most answers were either deleted, someone showing off about the topic but not actually answering the question or OP saying "never mind, I figured it out" and riding off into the sunset.
Reddit was one of the last places on the internet where you could read content without logging in. Almost all of the internet is Dark Web now, inaccessible unless you log in.