Reddit announced a new feature that addresses one of the more frustrating limitations of the platform over the years: You can now type in a query to search all the comments within a single Reddit post.
On desktop, the search field appears alongside the sort options, nestled underneath the comment box for leaving a new comment and above the feed of all previous comments.
It might seem basic, but it hasn’t been possible on the modern desktop version of Reddit before. CTRL + F or CMD + F for browser search didn’t always work, either, as some comments had to be expanded to be exposed to the browser’s search feature. That meant that to search all the comments within a thread, you had to go and expand them all before starting your search—something that simply wasn’t practical for popular posts with numerous comments.
Reddit previously rolled out the ability to search the contents of comments across all of Reddit or within specific communities, but you couldn’t drill down to individual posts with that feature.
Enlarge / This is where you’ll find the search field on the desktop web version of modern Reddit.
Samuel Axon
This new within-post search has rolled out to the desktop web as well as the iOS and Android apps—that’s a welcome move since a lot of Reddit features these days have tended to launch in the mobile apps first before arriving on desktop. (For example, the ability to mute subreddits on the discover page only recently launched on the desktop web version after months of availability in the apps.)
However, it doesn’t seem to be possible with the mobile web version. That’s unsurprising, given that Reddit is notoriously aggressive in trying to funnel mobile users into the app and away from the web.
Of course, none of this applies if you’re using the old web version of Reddit.
Alongside this new feature announcement, a Reddit rep highlighted some recent improvements that might have slipped through the cracks. They include the ability to search text within images across the site, tweaks to the algorithm for surfacing varied subreddits for a search query, and improvements to browsing through video search results.
