Today, Reddit announced a new feature that addresses one of the platform’s more frustrating limitations over the years: You can now type in a query to search all comments within in a Reddit post.
On desktop, the search field appears next to the sorting options, located below the comment box for leaving a new comment and above the feed of all previous comments.
It may sound basic, but it wasn’t possible with the modern desktop version of Reddit back then. CTRL+F or CMD+F for browser search also doesn’t always work, because some comments need to be expanded to be exposed in the browser’s search feature. That means searching all comments within a thread, you have to expand all of them before starting your search—something that isn’t practical for popular posts with lots of comments.
Reddit previously launched the ability to search the contents of comments across Reddit or within specific communities, but you can’t drill down into individual posts with that feature.
Samuel Axon
This new content-post search has been rolled out to the desktop web as well as iOS and Android apps — that’s a welcome move since many Reddit features these days tend to launch on mobile apps first. still comes to the desktop. (For example, the ability to mute subreddits on the discover page just rolled out to the desktop web version after months of being available in apps.)
However, it doesn’t seem to work on the mobile web version. That’s not surprising, since Reddit is notoriously aggressive in trying to funnel mobile users into the app and away from the web.
Of course, none of this works if you’re using the old web version of Reddit.
Along with this new feature announcement, a Reddit rep highlighted some recent improvements that may have fallen through the cracks. This includes the ability to search for text within images across the site, tweaks to the algorithm for surfing different subreddits for a search query, and improvements to browsing results in video search.