With 100,000 active groups and more than 13 billion posts and comments left by its users for 16 years, Reddit needed to oil up its search engine
After a first overhaul there is some months, the engine now adds the display of results found in the comments. Previously queries stopped at the content of the post and ignored any responses or comments made by users.
A serious shortcoming because these comments might contain a wealth of additional information. You had to go hunting yourself, laboriously reviewing all these publications.
The results page therefore hosts a fourth “Comments” tab in addition to “Posts” and “Communities” and “People” (these two formed one in the past). These comments are displayed independently of the publications and communities to which they belong. On the other hand, we cannot intervene on the original language, if we wanted to favor results in French, for example.
By adding this category of content, Reddit declares that it now has its entire content searchable by its search engine.
The relevance of the answers has also improved, assures the discussion platform. Responses will be returned even if their text does not contain 100% of the text formulated in the request. This does not mean that Reddit will answer anything and everything, but rather that a little play is accepted between the content of the question and that of the answers: ” We saw a 60% increase in the volume of responses to queries that previously would not have returned anything ».
The answers provided should also be more fresh » and more dependent on what other users are looking for at the same time, on the same subject. If certain answers have the favor of a large audience, they will be displayed in priority when doing similar searches.
These changes started on the web version of Reddit, the mobile app does not yet offer them, in particular this addition of the comments tab in the results view.
