On Thursday, Reddit announced a significant overhaul to 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 that this is 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 looking for a term across all of Reddit.
To access comment searches, click the “comments” tab at the top of the results page once you’ve typed in a query in the search bar located at the top of the website. Also, the search results page has a new look on both desktop and mobile.
Previously, 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 its 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 show up for your search. And Reddit claims it improved the search tool’s ability to guess user intent.
It’s 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, meaning you’ll 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 the subreddits you already follow; Reddit introduced a new discovery tab in its mobile app earlier this year.
