By: Nick Gambino
Reddit is built around not only original posts but also the endless parade of comments that populate underneath those posts. This is true of most social media platforms, but the text-heavy nature of Reddit makes the comment section all that more crucial.
With how important comments are to Reddit, it’s shocking that they haven’t had a way for users to search the comment section within a single post. That is, until now. Reddit has just added a search comments feature to the platform. Users will be able to punch up key words and phrases whether on the iOS or Android app or even on desktop. This has been in high demand, so it’s about time.
“A few months ago, we released the ability to search comments across Reddit on all platforms, but that’s not all we’ve been up to,” Reddit said in an announcement post. “We’ve been listening to your feedback and you can now search comments within a post on desktop, iOS, and Android apps.”
A workaround has kind of existed where you could open the post and search the page with Command+F or Control+F, but if you didn’t have all the comments expanded you wouldn’t be able to search all the comments. This new feature allows you to find exactly what you’re looking for in any comment on that thread whether the comment is expanded or not. No more endless scrolling, especially if it’s a popular post with hundreds or thousands of comments.
To use the new feature type into the “Search comments” bar right next to the “Sort By” function. Simply type in whatever you’re looking for and it’ll show you all the comments related to that search word or phrase.
This isn’t the only change Reddit had instituted in an effort to make searching user-generated content easier. They updated the algorithm used to search across all subreddits so it will show up more relevant results. A few months ago they also introduced the ability to search for texts in memes. This is big for those of us trying to relocate the perfect meme we saw that one time on Reddit.
