On the web, information can come from anywhere, shared by anyone, using any method possible. And Reddit touts itself as "the front page of the internet."
That is because Reddit is hailed for its digital influence, powered by its informed, passionate, trend-spotting and engaged users. While it isn't the largest platform on the internet, the website is known for its massively open nature and diverse community, who generate, debate and comment on a wide-ranging subject areas.
Because of this, many people consider the platform as a source of information.
The thing is, its search feature is far from being a search engine, and this makes it difficult for anyone to easily get to the information they want.
But this time, it's getting better at least.
This is because Reddit is updating its search feature to be able to surface results from comments.
Before this, Reddit users could only retrieve search results for original posts, communities, and individual users.
What this means, they had to browser through several posts, to then scroll to through what could sometimes be thousands of comments to find the information they were looking for in a thread.
This is certainly a huge issue, concerning the scale of Reddit.
With the update, everything on Reddit should be searchable.
In the announcement:
Reddit offers an example of what this means in practice.
Alongside the much-requested comments search, Reddit also said that it has improved search relevance to help users find results on the platform.
Previously, results had to match the user's query almost exactly, but with the update, things are less restrictive. Users' queries don't have to match the text of a post for the search to return relevant results.
In its tests, Reddit said that the changes led to a 60% increase in results.
Last but not least, Reddit is also updating its search's algorithms to utilize global user patterns and post interactions to improve results.
What this means, if users search for a topic that a lot of other people are searching for, the search feature will return will results that are sorted to prioritize the newest content or the most popular clicks.
This update should be very well received, since this is the first time that Reddit addresses one of the more frustrating limitations of the platform over the years: