Reddit adds 'search comments' tool to boost results for users

Online discussion forum Reddit has added the ability to search comments for the first time to help improve search results for its more that 50 million daily users.

With this latest update, rolling out first for desktop users, can be accessed by heading to the home feed and clicking within the search bar, and conduct a search.

"Additional new features include completely new user interfaces for search and improved search relevance," the company announced in an update.

With this new capability, users looking for particular discussions or comments on Reddit no longer need to click on several posts and then scroll through what can sometimes be thousands of comments to find threads that are relevant to them.

The new feature quickly gives 'redditors' the ability to comment search directly and further refine their searches by searching for comments within specific communities.

"In our limited initial testing, we saw that more than 26,000 redditors used comment search to scan through over five billion comments," the company informed.

Based on user feedback, it now prioritises posts over other content types in its updated search design and simplified the results page so users can more easily skim through the results and find what they're looking for.

The team is also working to make search safer for all users by reducing the number of unexpected results based on the searcher's intent.

"In Q1 of 2022 alone, we've seen a 20 per cent growth increase up from Q4 2021 in users utilising the search function on Reddit," the platform noted.

Everything on Reddit is now searchable -- users, posts, communities and now comments -- making it one of the first platforms with this capability.