On Thursday, Reddit announced a significant revision of the search functionality on its website. Comments are fully searchable for the first time, and other improvements have been made to ensure more robust, comprehensive, and useful search results.
Reddit says it’s the first time in the site’s 16-year history that everything is searchable, from users to posts to communities to comments. Users can also search for comments within specific subreddits, allowing for more targeted searches than searching for an expression across the entire Reddit.
To access comment searches, click the “comments” tab at the top of the results page after entering a query in the search bar at the top of the site. In addition, the search results page has got a new look on both desktop and mobile.
In the past, users had to take alternative approaches like going to Google with a site: reddit.com search to look up comments. Reddit says this was one of users’ most requested features based on a survey it ran.
Searches are less restrictive with matching results – like allowing different spellings of a word to still appear on your search. And Reddit claims that it improved the search engine’s ability to guess the user’s intent.
It is also worth noting that Reddit changed the criteria for ranking search results on your results pages. The amount of interactions a post receives plays a key role in how high it appears in your results, which means you will see the most popular posts at the top.
These changes seem to be part of an overall effort to make it easier to find content outside of the subreddits you already follow; Reddit introduced a new discovery tab in its mobile app earlier this year.