Reddit Releases New Updates, Including Comment Search And New Search Design

Since last year, Reddit has been continuously enhancing and updating search experiences to accommodate the millions of posts, communities, and users.

Now, the platform has released new upgrades and capabilities to make it easier to find and engage in the topics that interest the users most.

The platform has introduced a series of new upgrades to Reddit's search features, beginning with the ability to search comments, in order to make the massive platform of information more easily accessible.

With this recent change, users, posts, communities, and comments are now all searchable on Reddit. Completely redesigned search user interfaces and enhanced search relevancy are also among the other new features.

Comment Search

Users seeking specific topics or comments on Reddit don't need to keep clicking and scrolling through posts to locate threads that are relevant to them, thanks to this new feature. The new functionality addresses this issue by allowing users to directly search for comments and further filter their searches by looking for comments within certain communities.

For instance, if a user wants to locate a topic about the greatest places to visit in London, they used to have to go through each post in the r/London forum and browse the comments.

But with the new update, they can now quickly view all of the varied ideas for the greatest high tea spots that others have left in the comments.

Reddit polled users last year to find out what they wished to see most in search, and comment search was one of the most popular responses. During the platform's restricted early testing, it was discovered that over 26,000 Redditors utilized comment search to comb through over five billion comments.

New User Interfaces and Experiences

Reddit has also revamped the search results page on desktop and mobile, presenting material in a cleaner, more user-friendly format. In the redesigned search design, the tab now emphasizes posts above other content categories based on user input, and the results page has been streamlined so users can simply scroll through the results and locate what they're searching for.

In addition, the team is aiming to make search safer for all users by lowering the number of unexpected results depending on the searcher's objective. The site experienced a 20 percent rise in users using the Reddit search function in Q1 2022 alone, compared to Q4 2021.

Optimized Search Relevance

Reddit improved its infrastructure to increase search relevancy and deliver a better experience, focusing on:

• Offering more flexible matching — a query doesn't have to match 100% of a post's text to get relevant results. Reddit observed a 60 percent boost in results for previously unanswered searches as a result of this. Let's imagine someone searches for "dogecoin stonks 2021" and doesn't get it because there isn't an exact match; with the new approach, they'll be more likely to obtain similar results (and more of them) than before.

• Using user patterns to enhance results - the platform now has a better knowledge of what users are looking for on Reddit when they search. For instance, if a user searches for a popular topic, the tab would automatically filter their results to emphasize the most recent information, ensuring that the results remain current.

• Incorporating signals for post-results – this improvement considers users' clicks and interactions with search results as a 'signal' of what they could find useful. To illustrate, suppose 30 people selected the fourth post result when searching for "succulents," then it's highly probable for Reddit to place the fourth post at the top of the results the next time someone searches for "succulents."