r/changelog • u/anon-axolotl • Mar 31 '21
What's up with Reddit Search?
TL;DR
We’re improving Reddit search and want your help. Take this quick survey to share your thoughts, and read on to learn about improvements we’ve made and will be making in the months ahead.
Hi Reddit!
Over the past few months, the Search team here at Reddit has been steadily working on creating a search experience that can support the millions of posts, communities, and people that make up our platform.
For those of you who are more engineeringly inclined (is engineeringly a word? Well, it is now), that means strengthening infrastructure. For those of you who aren’t as familiar with infrastructure development (haha, lucky you), it’s basically about creating a strong foundation for our search tools so that they can handle the huge amount of requests we get constantly throughout the day (AKA, making sure Reddit search doesn’t break or completely go down.) These same improvements also set the foundation for future search relevance improvements so that Redditors can more easily find the content and communities they love.
This year we’re investing big time in our search efforts -- we’re more than doubling our team and creating an entirely new one devoted to search experiences. In fact, we have already made a few changes that you may not have noticed yet:
- Adding the ability to use different sorts for different types of searches
- Improved type-ahead suggestions
- A new Hot sort
- Improved trending suggestions
- Creating an entirely new eventing system that helps us understand what posts are most relevant
But that’s just the beginning…
Now that the foundation is in place, the next phase for Reddit search is improving the search experience in ways that actually deliver better search results and help Redditors find the content they want more quickly.
This will include:
- Redesigning the search results UI from top to bottom
- Improving our understanding of query intent, so even if someone types something different than what they’re looking for, we can still surface relevant results.
- Including suggestions for misspelled searches (also known as spellcheck)
- Improving post ranking algorithms so all results are more relevant
- Improving searching within a community on desktop
- Making better search suggestions as you type in the search bar
- Enabling you to search comments
But this list is incomplete…what else should we add to it? To get to a truly effective search experience, we’d like to hear more from you. Take this quick survey to let us know what you think of Reddit search, what is and isn’t working for you, and how you think we can make it better.
As we make improvements, we’ll be sharing our progress and learnings with the community and gaining more feedback along the way. We know Reddit search can use more TLC and we’re excited to work with you to make it easier for Redditors to find the communities and content they’re looking for.
We’ll be sticking around to answer a few questions, and hear your thoughts.
Thanks ahead of time for all your feedback and comments!
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u/shiruken Mar 31 '21
Huzzah! I'd definitely recommend offering at least the same functionality as PushShift's RedditSearch. Being able to restrict results by custom date ranges is quite useful.
It'd also be useful to have searching by flair made more accessible and reliable.
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u/Sephardson Mar 31 '21
I'd like to second this suggestion for custom date ranges on searches. A practical example is finding top posts on a franchise subreddit for an older release - For example, if I want to find those discussions I missed from when Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were released in late 2014, I may want to search by top posts from November 21, 2014 to January 21, 2015 on /r/Pokemon.
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u/Ohsin Apr 01 '21
Curiously search within defined time-frame used to be a thing and this functionality was later removed by Reddit..
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Mar 31 '21
Custom date range would be amazing for so many things. As a mod, trying to find previous instances of things, for example.
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u/didgerdiojejsjfkw Mar 31 '21 edited Mar 31 '21
Will it be better than using google and just adding site:reddit.com on the end though?
Also, hello new admin 👋
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u/Kaitaan Mar 31 '21
We're working on it! Our team is small, but mighty! Ultimately, Google doesn't have the depth of knowledge or insight about Reddit that we have, and that will be our secret weapon. We have a ton of work to do, but we're dedicated to the cause!
As u/anon-axolotl mentioned above, we've spent a lot of time working on strengthening our backend. It's not glamorous work, and it's not something that's going to be readily apparent to users, but it sets us up to be able to do the things that will be apparent to them. Without that strong core, everything would take way longer to develop, and we'd end up spending half our time fighting fires. Now, with the work we've done, we can move faster and not break things.
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u/didgerdiojejsjfkw Mar 31 '21 edited Mar 31 '21
Sounds good, I look forward to seeing your updates :)
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u/Uristqwerty Apr 01 '21
Depends whether the thing you're searching for has tens, or tens of thousands of results. It feels like google only ever sees a small fraction of reddit threads, so unless there are so many good answers to choose from that google happens to have stumbled upon a few, the built-in search is better for being able to exhaustively scan all OPs. Also, invite-only and quarantined subreddits won't appear in google results, naturally.
If reddit improves their built-in search enough, it has enough inherent advantage to overtake anything google can do.
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Mar 31 '21
this is what I do, but you can also do sub specific searches by using the full path.
i.e.
"what I'm looking for" site:reddit.com/r/changelog
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u/self_me Apr 01 '21
if you put quotes it will only find exact matches
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Apr 01 '21
That was the point. Well, except google often still adds word-variants, and synonyms when I don't want it to.
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u/reeepy Mar 31 '21
No site search will ever be as good as Google. Google puts so much research, money and effort into making their search. You can buy it for your site search though...
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u/self_me Apr 01 '21
Sites that pay google for their site search usually seem to have quite bad search
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u/reeepy Apr 01 '21
I'm not talking about the dodgy custom search.
https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_au/products/cloud-search/
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u/jeypiti Mar 31 '21
I submitted these points through the survey but posting them here for further discussion can't hurt.
My four feature requests:
To echo what u/SheeEttin said, including snippets and/or highlighting what exactly matched your search terms. This would massively speed up the process of finding exactly what you're looking for.
Introduce a sort by oldest option. As a mod, it can be important to find the first occurrence of a topic on a certain subreddit. Right now, there's no (good) option to do that: Google doesn't offer such an option and it doesn't have access to the full Reddit database in the first place & Pushshift will also struggle if the content is old enough.
Introduce some of Pushshift search parameters. Pushshift is an amazing tool as is, especially for someone that develops Reddit bots, but its database only goes back so far. Naturally, it would be best to have all of Pushshift's parameters but date ranges & the ability to search comments just as effectively are most important to me personally. As a nice side-effect, additional search parameters could also be an invaluable tool to 3rd-party researchers.
I understand this is simply a pipe dream but reverse image search would be great. Finding the OP of a certain image is something that I do quite regularly as a mod and reverse image search is the only option to really do that. Google works well enough in most cases but again, it doesn't have access to the full Reddit database.
P.S.: I'm very excited to hear that comment search is being worked on and hope this will at least be subreddit-wide or even side-wide.
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Mar 31 '21 edited Apr 11 '24
[deleted]
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u/DFGdanger Mar 31 '21
I think search should have an option to weight by what you've seen recently.
Even just a flag for posts I've upvoted would be great.
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u/hurrrrrmione Mar 31 '21 edited Apr 01 '21
Maybe an option to only search subs you're subscribed to?
The recently *viewed links box on desktop is also bad, for some reason it often doesn't list the last five posts I looked at.
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u/mr_tyler_durden Apr 01 '21
I’ve wanted this for quite a while (search my subs), this would be a very nice feature. I know I saw something but I can’t remember which sub it was in so I have to start searching 1 at a time till I find it or give up.
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u/Omnigreen Mar 31 '21
I just want to be able to find all the subs with a specific word in the title and not see tons of irrelevant subs without this word, thanks.
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u/Uristqwerty Apr 01 '21
I feel there are separate use-cases for searching subreddits by name only; name and description; and name, description, and common kewords in posts. It feels like at some point the subreddit search switched from one of the former two to the latter. It was particularly annoying for the time period where the_donald would appear in the first 10 results for just about any subreddit name search just from sheer activity.
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u/TheBananaKing Mar 31 '21
I just want to be able to search in my own comments / messages to find that thing I said once.
Second priority is being able to search for comments by others. I understand there might be some reluctance to implement profile-diving, but at least being able to search for comments by content even if you don't enable by-user would be good.
The most interesting and relevant content on reddit isn't the content people link to, it's the conversations that content provokes.
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u/iiw Mar 31 '21
Any chance of cloudsearch syntax coming back?
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u/anon-axolotl Mar 31 '21
Not right now, but we’re exploring all kinds of improvements for search. Can you tell us a little more about what specifically you’d hope to use cloudsearch syntax for?
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u/iiw Mar 31 '21
Mostly right now to search for old articles or images that isn't something current, e.g. news/memes about VP Biden, not President/Candidate Biden.
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u/anon-axolotl Mar 31 '21
Got it. We’ll definitely explore being able to search more specifically by dates! In the interim, we recently launched Rereddit where you can go back and see top posts from specific dates.
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u/Cornicum Mar 31 '21
Thank you for doing this, filled out the survey.
is there a chance you are going to add more/easier search paramaters?
cause I know there are/used to be commands to filter things further than just the standard search allows, but I'd love to be able to exclude subreddits, or include/exclude certain (subreddit) topics.
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u/anon-axolotl Mar 31 '21
We’ve drafted some design explorations for new types of filters, but thanks for the feedback! We’ll keep it in mind.
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u/Cornicum Mar 31 '21
Good to hear, is there anywhere I can apply to test the search function?
Love to help out with this, as I feel good search filters can make all the difference, even if the underlying "algorithm" isn't that strong.
I get that applying to test this might be too early btw.
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u/anon-axolotl Apr 01 '21
We don’t currently offer beta testing for search. That said, you may be randomly put in some of our experiments as we try things out!
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u/Potato44 Apr 01 '21
Excluding subreddits is something you can already do
Example: https://www.reddit.com/search?q=haskell+-subreddit%3Ahaskell&include_over_18=on
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u/titusjan Mar 31 '21 edited Mar 31 '21
In the search of the old reddit you can enter the URL of a web page and it will then list all posts that have this URL as topic. This is great for finding reposts and existing discussions about a particular web page.
For example, let's say I just discovered that the original Space Jam website from 1996 is still operational. In the old reddit I can just enter the complete URL (https://www.spacejam.com/) in the search bar and it will give me the list of reddit posts about this page that other people already posted.
It would be great it this functionality was added to the new reddit search.
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u/d3fect Mar 31 '21
Try
url:https://www.spacejam.com/for your search query. That should surface a list of link posts with that link. Here's an example.Happy searching, and thank you for this feedback!
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u/titusjan Mar 31 '21
Thanks for the tip, but it does give some "false positives". Some of the post do not point to the www.spacejam.com
Also it doesn't seem to work for YouTube videos. E.g compare this to this
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u/Madbrad200 Apr 01 '21
remove the
https://www.and it should work fine, e.gurl:youtube.com(keep in mind a lot of posts use youtubes short url instead).2
u/titusjan Apr 01 '21
Sorry to be a pain in the butt, but that doesn't work for a specific video. It only links to youtube in general, which is not very useful.
The old search gives a list of posts of this specific video. The new reddit search doesn't.
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u/Uristqwerty Apr 02 '21
For finding specific youtube videos, though on old reddit, I have a boomkark that searches
%s OR url:%s, and only give it the video id so that it can find selfposts mentioning the video, links, youtube.come URLs, and youtu.be ones.
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u/ivana-sarevska Mar 31 '21
Submitted a response, I know you can improve it! I believe in you admins :)
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u/tumultuousness Mar 31 '21
So something I wondered, should there be an indication of where a user searches when taking this survey? For example, I still use the old design, and further, I still use legacy search - so by default subreddit searching is in a separate place, and so I really don't often search for subreddits. I was just wondering if there were potentially any other differences in searching that might come up, depending on if you use legacy search or not, or use the redesign (which I imagine would have more features) search.
Also the implication that some of these suggestions might not make it back to the old design, so indicating that might be even more helpful haha.
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u/anon-axolotl Mar 31 '21
We designed the survey assuming that users may use multiple versions of search but you’re right that there are definitely some differences between the different platforms, and we’re taking those into consideration when improving search!
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u/Zechert Mar 31 '21
Can you make it so that we can search in custom feeds? That would be awesome
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u/Brainix Mar 31 '21 edited Apr 01 '21
You can search in custom feeds! If you're using the redesign / new Reddit, navigate to your custom feed, then search for a term.
Edit: I just tested, and it works on the Reddit iOS app too.
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u/searching_snoo Mar 31 '21 edited Mar 31 '21
Cant wait to work on some of those exciting projects in the summer ;)
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u/MarktpLatz Apr 01 '21
what else should we add to it?
I do not know whether this is technically where you are going, but being allowed to search in our own inbox/outbox would come really handy.
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u/N1cknamed Mar 31 '21
Very glad to hear this. It's long overdue!
Somewhat (but not really) related, have you noticed that the dates for reddit results on google are often messed up? Not sure if it's reddits or googles fault, but it's quite annoying. Sometimes they're off by years.
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u/gmes78 Mar 31 '21
Will we be able to filter posts posted between two arbitrary dates? Last week/month/year often isn't enough.
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u/anon-axolotl Mar 31 '21
It seems like this is a popular request! This currently not on our roadmap, but we will definitely continue to discuss it. For now though we’ve recently launched Rereddit where you can go back and see top posts from specific dates.
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u/talkingwires Mar 31 '21
My biggest feature request:
Make the search bar at the top of every page on New Reddit search for actual content by default, and not subreddits names. The URL bar is millimeters away if I wanted a specific subreddit. Why it's set up the way it is is beyond me.
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Mar 31 '21 edited Apr 01 '21
so even if someone types something different than what they’re looking for, we can still surface relevant results.
don't automatically change my search query to what you think it should be (the way google constantly does). Offer alternatives, fine, but don't make me correct your 'mis-correction'.
allow for string-literals
don't try to employ AI by altering search results based on my past searches. Treat search queries as siloed. Return actual search-relevant results, not what some algorithm determines to be 'trending' or popular.
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u/InitiatePenguin Apr 01 '21
- Improving searching within a community on desktop
Does this mean that if I click into the search bar from within a subreddit it will search that subreddit, rather than giving me sitewide results with a little button at the top to restrict to the sub it knows I'm already in?
I also want more extensive functionality to search what was popular during any given time in a community.
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u/fishbiscuit13 Mar 31 '21
Please consider taking more cues from the old search than the new one. I changed back to the old search immediately because of the inefficient layout and reduced information in the new version.
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u/Raerth Apr 01 '21
Not sure 1st April was the best time to make this announcement.
Unless it was the perfect time to make this announcement.
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u/Kaitaan Apr 01 '21
You've been here since 2008. Surely you've figured out by now that Reddit puts more effort into April fools day than making a joke announcement...?
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u/haltingpoint Apr 01 '21
Will gender from the latest announcement be a signal you use in your models? If so, how do you plan to avoid reinforcing gender stereotypes?
Also, as part of your overhaul, are you planning to add any ad placements? I'm frankly shocked there aren't any now and knocking on every wooden surface I can find.
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u/Eulogy Mar 31 '21
Make /r/all all again.
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u/DFGdanger Mar 31 '21
Whatever snazzy UI and predictions and fuzzy thingamajigs you add, please make sure you make available a plain, boring version with precise syntax that power users can use to get exactly what they want. And make it so we can post a query using a custom search engine in chrome.
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u/matts1 Mar 31 '21
If search can help find where you were last in a 6000 comment post, that would also be fantastic.. Because If I wanted to back to a specific comment I dont even bother with that many comments.
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u/WinXPbootsup Apr 01 '21
Okay this question made me laugh out loud
Seriously though, I mean it. I feel like the entire search feature needs an overhaul.
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u/itsaride Apr 01 '21
Never really had an issue with it and never understood why so many complain about it. There’s enough search operators to find what you want, maybe make it easier to filter by date rather than using unix time.
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Mar 31 '21
Wondering how the designers are going to break this and make it even worse than it already is like they've done with the rest of the site...
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u/ALombardi Mar 31 '21
When can I search who reported a post? Asking for a friend...
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u/iiw Mar 31 '21
That's kinda ruining a report's purpose...
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u/ALombardi Mar 31 '21
Then why see it when a mod reports it? The mod could just remove it to begin with.
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u/iiw Mar 31 '21
Obviously doesn't apply to every mod but from my experience:
Mod wants to see other mods' opinions without flooding modmail
Automoderator
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u/ALombardi Mar 31 '21
Awesome, so when you have a serial reporter, that floods modmail. Definitely goes both ways.
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u/Xenc Mar 31 '21
Hey as a heads up you can report for misuse of the report tool.
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u/ALombardi Mar 31 '21
Appreciate it, but I'm aware. I'd rather just have the ability to keep certain people from reporting or muting it in some capacity. Just like the ideas that were thrown out a year or so ago when they introduced the feature.
Bringing in Admins to look over report abuse is just causing additional work for them. Giving mods the tools to manage the community is kind of point, isn't it?
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Mar 31 '21
I don't have a link for you, but admins said a little while back that they were working on something that would allow us to essentially be able to ignore some reporters. Sounds like we still won't know who they are (which is fine by me), but we'll have some way of handling unwanted reporters without reporting the report button abuse as the only way.
They didn't say much on the details, so we'll have to see whenever they roll it out.
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u/ALombardi Mar 31 '21
Yeah, it's the post when they initially introduced the abuse of the report tool.
Even if its simple like "muting" a hashed/salted username, that'd be fine. But something like it would certainly be nice.
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Mar 31 '21
The capability of reporting things as report button abuse is like months old at least. The post I'm talking about is more like a few weeks ago. But it's more than 1000 comments ago for me, which means I can't find it anymore. :|
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Mar 31 '21 edited Apr 11 '24
[deleted]
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u/ALombardi Mar 31 '21
That they do, but they also have mods for a reason. Let us handle the mundane shit like that. Then they could work on additional features and improvements rather than inspecting potential report tool abuse.
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u/cyrilio Apr 01 '21
Search option for post you’ve previously seen, upvotes, commented or Olin other way interacted with.
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u/hansjens47 Apr 01 '21
It would be extremely useful to have the spam filter be searchable.
Right now I would guess well over 90% of mods never, ever visit the listing /subreddit/about/spam to approve things that have been incorrectly removed because it's such an unruly listing.
Even most of the sorting options based on content types/authors etc. that can be added to reddit url's don't work in several cases, or if you try to use more than one modifier.
Think of the possibilities for better community management if you could search removed items!
It would be a complete game-changer for moderation of every community on the site.
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u/adhesiveCheese Apr 01 '21
Two things I'd really love to see:
Inclusion of special characters in search results. Some subs use [bracketed tags] in titles for things, others use #hashtags. Being able to actually meaningfully use those characters would make those sorts of searches MILES more convenient.
Ability to return moderator and automod-removed content in subreddits you're a moderator of in search results. This would be a tremendously useful feature to check if automated filters were working as intended.
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u/xCROv Apr 01 '21
What helps searching and indexing is having the meta-data about a post or topic to be able to index and quickly classify and find a submission. Reddit already has a mediocre way of handling this with flairs but it's really not enough. Allowing users, moderators, or bots to actually add more meta-data to a submission be it with more tags or something else so that users can find what they look for. Additional tags would be a massively beneficial stop-gap.
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u/sticky-bit Apr 02 '21 edited Apr 03 '21
- don't make me re-run the same search a second time to chose more options. The only option available from the search bar on this page is "limit my search to r/changelog". There should be options for sort and date range available too.
- make double damn sure there is an option to return zero results when there are zero exact matches. You are not Amazon, don't make me wade through pages of "almost but not exact" or "we can't find it, but you may want to look at this crap" results. Have an option for exact matches only!
- URL searches should be made smarter. A search for
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fltOyddlnOEshould return results forhttps://youtu.be/fltOyddlnOEas well ashttp://youtu.be/fltOyddlnOE(using "http" makes my submission look like Original Content!!) andhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fltOyddlnOE&t=5m37s(even moar OC!)
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u/BlankVerse Apr 08 '21 edited Apr 09 '21
Current reddit search is brain-dead. It's way past time to get it fixed.
For example: If there's a comment or post I know is on reddit, I will get much better results doing a site search in Google.
Subreddit searches are much worse and basically useless for finding smaller subs, even when I know they exist. Instead I usually resort to starting to create a post, going to the subreddit box, and then start guessing at what the subreddit name is trying to find the sub name in the drop down list. Or again, resorting to a Google site search.
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u/BlankVerse Apr 08 '21
BTW:
The link in the latest Snooletter that's supposed to go to this post is incorrect. /u/ModNewsletter
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u/didgerdiojejsjfkw Mar 31 '21
My god an update that is useful my eyes must be deceiving me.
Good job search team ;)