John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 04.15.2022 10:Apr AM EDT

Reddit Now Allows You To Search for Individual Comments After 17 Years of Requesting

Reddit comments are now searchable. Finally.

Reddit Inc. recently announced that it added new features to its platform, with searchable comments being the first and foremost among them.

The new feature is currently only available on desktops while the feature's rollout date for its mobile apps is still unknown.

Reddit Searchable Comments Feature Details

According to Reddit's announcement, the new feature would let users looking for particular discussions or comments on the platform search them up directly instead of slogging through several posts and thousands of unrelated comments and threads to find the comment or discussion they're looking for.

For example, if you want to find a thread about the best locations in London, you can now see all the different recommendations on the best places for high tea that people have shared in their comments. Previously, you had to look through each post in the r/London community and browse their comments section to find it.

The searchable comments feature was one of it not the single most asked-for feature on the platform for 17 years, according to Engadget. Reddit has also mentioned that in its limited initial testing in 2021, it saw more than 26,000 Redditors use comment search to scan through over five billion comments.

The company also conducted a survey in 2021, with searchable comments being one of the top results.

Other New Updates

Aside from searchable comments and discussions, Reddit also added a new look for the platform's search results page on desktop and mobile that highlights a new and simpler design. This new design will also prioritize posts over other content types and has simplified the results page so you can skim through the results much easier than before and find what you're looking for quicker.

This prioritization of posts over other content types is based on user feedback from the survey and study previously mentioned in this article.

Reddit has also improved its search infrastructure and focused on less restrictive matching, using user patterns to improve results, and incorporating signals for post results. These key points were kept in mind while improving the platform's search infrastructure to make user searches easier, quicker, and more efficient.

For instance, searching for something on Reddit will show related results instead of search results with the exact wording, which makes the search less restrictive, per The Verge.

Another instance is when you and 30 other people interact with a particular search result on Reddit through clicks and taps, Reddit would now notice this and place that search result at the top rather than in its original positioning.

Another example is when a user is searching for a topic that a lot of other people are searching for, that user will find that Reddit has automatically sorted their search results to prioritize the newest content to make sure the results are the latest.