Reddit Search Tricks: Reddit search isn't great, but these tricks will help you out.

Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the internet, but for some reason, it has the most notorious search function of any social media site. Before you decide to add “Reddit” to the end of your Google searches, check out these tricks to help you navigate the site! 🚀

Search One Subreddit at a Time

Reddit has a ton of smaller, more focused communities called “subreddits.” You can think of them as forums within the site. If you’re looking for specific information about something or someone, you’ll get much better results if you only search within that subreddit. 🔍
For example, if you search for correct tire pressure on all of Reddit, you'll see a lot of different posts that may or may not include the answer you're looking for, even if you type in the exact tire model and size. However, if you limit your search to the subreddit for your specific car model, you're more likely to get the results you're looking for. 🛞

Limiting your search to just one subreddit at a time minimizes the amount of irrelevant posts in your search results. It's also worth mentioning that Reddit has a ton of weird subreddits in addition to the most popular ones. So, don't limit your search to just one if you can't find what you're looking for in the most popular one. Explore! 🌍

For example, if your cat is exhibiting strange symptoms and you want to see if anyone else has experienced the same thing, you can try searching for symptoms on r/cats, r/CatAdvice, r/CATHELP, r/AskVet, r/vet, and many more. There must be someone whose cat ate one of those tiny JLab JBuds Mini earbuds, and now the poor feline can't stop listening to your AI-generated mixtape. 🎶
Finding subreddits, in and of itself, is actually the hardest part. The most obvious solution is to look through the broadest category of what you're looking for, but subreddits can be extremely granular and specific. Luckily, there's a subreddit dedicated just to finding other subreddits called /r/findareddit. 🔗

Jason Montoya / How-To Geek

Use Filtering and Sorting Functions

By default, Reddit search sorts your results by relevance. The main ranking factor it uses is how closely the content relates to your keyword, but it also takes into account the age of the post and its overall popularity. You can change this by selecting a different sort option, as in the screenshot below:

Here's what each sort option does:

• “Hot” shows trending topics. 🔥
• “Top” prioritizes posts with lots of upvotes and comments.
• “New” is for showing recent posts. 📅
• “Comment Count” prioritizes the most discussed posts, regardless of votes.

The different categories at the top allow you to choose between “Posts,” “Comments,” and “Media” in your search results. While they’re pretty self-explanatory, you don’t want to overlook them. “Comments” is especially useful because you can see full comments that might have the information you’re looking for. As for “Safe Search,” you can enable or disable NSFW (Not Suitable For Work) results. 🔒

As for filters, Reddit search doesn’t give you many options to filter results – the only option available is time! You can limit your search to posts and comments based on when they were posted. Still, depending on what you’re looking for, you can do a lot with this. If you’re looking for very recent news and want to see the human experience in real time, use the “Last Hour” or “Today” filter. 🕒 “Last Week” is great for trending topics, especially when combined with the “Hot” sort option. All of these filters are somewhat similar to “New,” but restrict results to a specific time frame.

The “Last Month” and “Last Year” filters are great for narrowing down your research to timely posts. They work wonderfully with “Top,” because you can see the best posts published within a specific time frame.
Maybe you're looking for tips on how to overclock your CPU and don't want to see results from the Intel Core 2 Duo era, or you just want to see how others are using your favorite gaming mouse against newer models. This filter is generally useful for checking how older products and trends are holding up today, like evaluating the reliability of an aging car. 🚗

Use Modifiers for Advanced Searches

If you want to become a pro at searching Reddit, you need to start using modifiers. Just like other search engines, including Google, Modifiers are specific terms that fine-tune your search query based on what attributes you want to find. This may sound complicated at first, but they're basically filters! You'll get a feel for modifiers when you see them in action. For example, I can use the author modifier to find all posts made by just that user. Here's an example of all posts made by Bill Gates (the real one):

Remember not to leave spaces between the modifier and the keyword, so it will be “author:thisisbillgates” and not “author: thisisbillgates.” Also, you can’t use spaces. Here’s a Full list of modifiers and what they do:

• author Filter posts or comments made by the user you specify (for example, author:thisisbillgates).
• subreddit Only show results from the subreddit you specify (e.g. subreddit:catsonglass)
• title search for posts that have your keyword in the title (e.g. title:protein).
• selftext search the post content for your keyword (e.g. selftext:dlc).
• url find links that contain your keyword (e.g. url:ryzen).
• site limit results to only the website you specify (for example, site:howtogeek.com).
• flair only displays posts that contain the tag you specify (for example, flair:nvidia).
• self:true either self:yes limits searches to text posts only.
• self:false either self:no limit searches to link posts only.
• nsfw:yes only displays NSFW content (only works with SafeSearch disabled).
• nsfw:no only displays content that is not tagged as NSFW.

Justin Duino / How-To Geek

If you still can't get good results using Reddit search, you can always turn to the most popular search engine: Google. I say Google specifically because Reddit is blocking other search engines from crawling the site, significantly reducing its effectiveness. 🔍

The easiest way to get Reddit results on Google is to simply put “Reddit” at the end of your search query. However, if you want to specifically browse Reddit, it’s best to use the “site:reddit.com” modifier before your search query so that you only get results from the genuine site. Much like with searching Reddit, you can combine various modifiers and operators for complex searches. 🛠️

While Reddit's search isn't perfect, it's a lot better than it used to be! If you use Reddit frequently, consider writing down and memorizing some of the most useful modifiers and operators, as they can significantly refine your searches. Equipped with these tools and knowledge, you'll soon be a Reddit search expert! 🎉