Reddit Updates Search Tools, Adds Capacity to Search User Comments

Reddit has announced a significant expansion of its search capacity, with the option to now search Reddit comments, in addition to posts, providing new ways to facilitate discovery, and uncover relevant conversations in the app.

As you can see in this example, now, when you conduct a keyword search on Reddit, you’ll be able to filter your results by ‘Comments’, in addition to the existing content category filters.

As explained by Reddit:

“With this new capability, users looking for particular discussions or comments on Reddit no longer need to click on several posts and then scroll through what can sometimes be thousands of comments to find threads that are relevant to them. The new feature solves this problem and quickly gives redditors the ability to comment search directly and further refine their searches by searching for comments within specific communities.”

That could provide a big boost for your social conversation research. Reddit’s active communities have always been a rich vein for gleaning insight into audience interests, but now, you can drill down even further, and get people’s direct responses to different ideas and products, or mentions of the same within in-app conversations.

That could be a great way to gather valuable feedback, and it’s worth taking a look at what you can find with the new search filters to better understand the different elements.

In addition to this, Reddit has also updated its search results page, with a simplified layout to better focus on the results.

“Based on user feedback we now prioritize posts over other content types in our updated search design, and we’ve simplified the results page so that users can more easily skim through and find what they’re looking for.”

Reddit’s also working to improve search relevance, with less restrictive matching to provide more results for queries that previously wouldn’t have produced any matches, more attuned matching based on popular searches, and the incorporation of previous search signals to better order relevant results.

And clearly those efforts are paying off – Reddit says that In Q1 2022, it saw a 20% increase in people using its search option, a massive jump, while over 26k early testers for its new comment search capacity have already scanned through over 5 billion comments in the app.

It could be a handy feature, for varying purpose, and definitely, for social media marketers, it could be hugely valuable to be able to scan through subreddit chatter to enhance your perspective on your target audience.

Reddit’s new search options are rolling out from today.