On Thursday, Reddit announced a major update to the search functionality on its website. Comments are fully searchable for the first time, and other improvements have been made to provide more reliable, complete, and useful search results.
Reddit reports that for the first time in the site’s 16-year history, everything is searchable, from users to posts, communities, and comments. Users can also search for comments on specific subreddits, allowing for more targeted searches than searching for a term all over Reddit.
Previously, users had to use alternative approaches such as searching Google site:reddit.com to find comments. Reddit says it was one of the most requested features by its users, based on a survey they conducted.
Searches are less limited by matching results—for example, allowing different spellings of a word to still show up for your search. And Reddit claims it improved the search tool’s ability to guess the user’s intent.
It’s also worth noting that Reddit has changed the criteria for ranking search results on your results pages. The number of interactions with a post plays a key role in how high it will appear in your results, which means you’ll see the most popular posts at the top.
These changes seem to be part of an overall effort to make it easier to find content outside of the subreddits you’re already following; Earlier this year, Reddit introduced a new discovery tab to its mobile app.