Reddit today announced a new feature that removes one of the platform’s most annoying limitations in years: you can now enter a query to search for all comments in a single Reddit post.
On the desktop, the search field appears next to the sorting options below the comment field for leaving a new comment and above the feed of all previous comments.
This may sound simple, but it wasn’t possible before on the modern desktop version of Reddit. CTRL+F or CMD+F for browser search also didn’t always work, as some comments had to be expanded to be available for the browser’s search function. This meant that to search through all the comments in a thread, you had to go and expand them all before starting the search, which was just not practical for popular posts with numerous comments.
Reddit previously implemented the ability to search the content of comments throughout Reddit or in specific communities, but with this feature you couldn’t jump to individual posts.
This new in-post search has made its way to the desktop web as well as the iOS and Android apps — a welcome move as many of Reddit’s features tend to launch on mobile apps first before appearing on desktop these days. (For example, the ability to disable subreddits on the discovery page was only recently launched on desktop web after months of availability in apps.)
Of course, none of this applies if you’re using the old web version of Reddit.
Along with the announcement of the new feature, a Reddit rep highlighted some recent improvements that may have gone unnoticed. These include the ability to search for text in images across the site, tweaking the algorithm to display different subreddits for a search query, and improving the browsing experience for video search results.