The days of wading through pages of comments on a Reddit post to find exactly what you’re looking for are no more. The internet forum has added a new feature to posts. Users can now search for specific words or terms within a posts’ comment section without having to rely on ctrl+F or cmd+F, the company announced on Monday.
Almost a year ago, Reddit introduced the ability to perform a site-wide search focusing on comments with the introduction of a dedicated comment tab to the search bar. With the new update though, Redditors can more easily wade navigate around the comments of a particular post. “No more long scrolling sessions — quickly get to the parts of the conversation you’re looking for and jump in where you want,” one of the site’s mods, u/anon-axoltl, wrote in the announcement.
The new feature is available on the iOS and Android apps, as well as on the Reddit desktop site, the company said. Gizmodo verified that the new widget shows up on all three versions of the platform. On desktop, the comment-specific search bar shows up next to the “Sort By” drop down feature below the add a comment box. On mobile, comment search is accessible by navigating to a post and clicking the magnifying glass icon in the blue bar at the top — as demonstrated in the GIF at the top of this post.
On top of the new comment search feature, the announcement also highlighted a few other recent updates to search on Reddit. In October 2022, the platform introduced the ability to search text within meme images. It also updated its subreddit search algorithms and changed the format of video search results.
Redditors responded to the site change with an uncharacteristic level of enthusiasm. “Godsend,” commented one u/Caring_Cactus. “Noice,” “Very Nice,” and “Neat!,” said others. It’s rare to find such an ultra-positive string of Reddit comments, so clearly the site admin stumbled onto a desired adjustment.
Reddit has become an increasingly popular encapsulation and catalogue of opinions on the internet. In recent years, Google searchers have been tacking “Reddit” onto queries to increase their chances of finding their desired content (be it earnest reviews or place-specific information) — leading some to suggest that Reddit could become a better search tool than Google. Now, with the improved site search functionality, the middleman of Google becomes even less necessary.
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