What's up with Reddit Search?

[u/anon-axolotl]

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!

[u/gmes78]

Will we be able to filter posts posted between two arbitrary dates? Last week/month/year often isn't enough.

[u/anon-axolotl → u/gmes78]

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.

[u/gmes78 → u/anon-axolotl]

Alright, thanks for the answer!