On Thursday, Reddit announced a major overhaul of its website search functionality. Comments are fully searchable for the first time and other improvements have been made to ensure more powerful, comprehensive and useful search results. Reddit says this is the first time in the site’s 16 years that everything can be searched, from users to posts, communities and comments. Users can also search for comments on specific subreddits, allowing for more targeted searches than searching for a term across Reddit. To access comment searches, click the Feedback tab at the top of the results page after entering a query in the search bar at the top of the site. Also, the search results page has a new look on both desktops and mobiles. Previously, users had to follow alternative approaches, such as going to Google with a site search: reddit.com to search for comments. Reddit says this was one of the features requested by its users based on a survey it conducted. Searches are less restrictive with matching results — such as allowing different word spells to appear in your search. And Reddit claims to have improved the search tool’s ability to guess the user’s intent. It is also worth noting that Reddit has changed the criteria for ranking search results on your results pages. The number of interactions a post receives plays a key role in how high it ranks in your results, which means you will see the most popular posts near 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 has introduced a new tracking tab in its mobile app earlier this year.
