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Reddit is making itself entirely searchable

Users can search comments for the first time.

An illustration of the Reddit logo displayed on a smartphone screen

You can now search comments on Reddit.

Image: Omar Marques/Getty Images

Gone are the days of Googling a question and putting the word "Reddit" next to it to turn up the answers you're looking for. Reddit is making itself much more searchable by for the first time allowing users to comb through comments for keywords.

The platform announced a host of new features on Thursday aimed at making its content "more easily searchable," including the ability to search for comments in discussions, updating its user interface and improving "search relevance," Reddit said in a blog post. The new features rolled out Thursday for Reddit on the desktop.

"With this latest update, for the first time in sixteen years everything on Reddit is now searchable — users, posts, communities, and now comments — making Reddit one of the first platforms with this capability," the company said in its post.

The comment search capability allows users to search for comment threads in specific communities rather than having to search through posts and comments to find the information that's relevant to them. Reddit surveyed users last year and found that one of the top demands for its search function was the capability to search comments.

Reddit also updated its search function to make its results more relevant. For one, the platform is loosening restrictions on text matching in search, making it so that search results that don't 100% match the keywords will still turn up. Reddit also will now monitor use patterns to turn up better results as a way of "understanding of user intentions" when they search for something, meaning that if someone is searching a popular topic that many other users are looking at, it will automatically sort results to prioritize the fresh content. It's also looking at popularity of posts within search results to determine how it prioritizes posts in topics when searched.

The platform also updated its user interface for search to prioritize posts over other content types, as well as simplify the results page to help users "more easily skim" to find what they're looking for.

Nat Rubio-Licht

Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.

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