Reddit Comments are Now Searchable

Sophie Webster, Tech Times 15 April 2022, 09:04 am

On Friday, Apr. 15, Reddit announced that it is finally making its comments searchable. This feature has been requested by fans for 17 years now.

Users can now easily search for specific replies and comments on Reddit posts.

The product and design staff of Reddit wrote that users would have to scroll through each post in the community and browse through the comments to find the one they are looking for.

Now, users can just easily see the comments that they want to read, according to Engadget.

The ability to search comments was the top feature request from a survey conducted by the platform in 2021.

On top of that, during the platform's limited initial testing, around 26,000 people employed the feature to scan through more than five billion comments.

Also Read: Reddit Tests NFT Profile Picture Feature Similar to Twitter | How it Works

Reddit also improved its search relevance to help its users find results, In the past, a result had to match a query accurately, but it is now less restrictive.

For example, if a user searches for dogecoin 20201, it does not find what a user is looking for because there is no exact match. But with the new treatment, they are more likely to get the related results.

In fact, Reddit said that it saw a 60% increase in results for queries that previously did not receive results. The Search feature now also prioritizes newer content, and it checks the user's search history to prioritize the results.

Finally, Reddit improved its search interface with a better, simpler design based on user feedback. It now prioritizes posts over other types of content and simplifies the results page to easily find what you are looking for.

It is also reducing the number of unexpected results based on the intent to make the search safer. The new search feature is now available around the world on the desktop version, but there is no word on when they are coming to the apps, according to MacRumors.

Reddit to Explore Video Feature

According to TechCrunch, Reddit is currently exploring the idea of bringing more user-generated video content to its forums.

Reddit has not revealed much about this potential video feature, and there is no testing done yet, but it may involve the use of TikTok-like video editing tools, including the ability for people to react to videos posted by others by adding their own video to another's.

The ability to combine the videos from different people grew popular on TikTok through Stitches and Duets, which have since been adopted by other social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram.

In Reddit's case, the goal is not to build out its own TikTok competitor aimed at creators as other social media platforms have done, but instead to create a video tool that would continue the company's mission of enabling the users to engage in discussions on topics that they like.

Currently, a lot of these discussions on the platform's site are written in text, but video reactions could add a new layer to these online conversations.

In 2021, Reddit launched a pop-up guide in its mobile app.