Reddit Search

TL;DR Welcome to the Reddit Search homepage where you can learn about search features, relevant help center articles, and tricks to get the most out of Reddit search!

The Basics

What types of search are on Reddit?

On Reddit you can search four main content types:

• Posts
  
  • Look at these for image, video, text, and more types of content from users
• Comments
  
  • Look at these for any discussion heavy topic you’re searching for (eg. advice or set of recommendations)
• Communities (aka Subreddits or things that start with r/ )
  
  • Look at these if you want to find a group related to an interest of yours
• People (aka Users or u/)
  
  • Look at these if you are looking for a user who is talking about a specific topic

What filters and sorts are available?

You can find each of these content types on a different tab on the search results page

By default, you’ll be using “Relevance” sort, which factors in the relative rarity of each word (biasing towards words which are less common), the age of the post, and the number of votes and comments it has.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, for posts, you can change your Sort. However, none of the following take into account how rare the words in your query are, so you might find a lot of results that match the most common word in your query at the top of the result list.

Other types of sorts are:

• Hot – Prioritizes posts that have recently been getting interaction (upvotes, comments etc)
  • Use this if you’re looking for trending topics
    
• Top - Prioritizes posts that have all-time high upvote numbers and comments (can be filtered by time too)
  
  • Use this if you’re looking for famous posts (eg. Obama’s Ask Me Anything on Reddit)
    
• New - Prioritizes the newest posts, regardless of interactions
  
  • Use this if you’re trying to see the most up to date information
    
• Most Comments – Prioritizes posts that have the most comments
  
  • Use this if you’re looking for posts that have a lot of discussion

You can also restrict the time period you’re searching in by using the Time Filter where you can filter by the past year, month, week, 24 hours, and hour.

How can I quickly navigate from subreddit to subreddit? (Typeahead)

We have a feature that’s similar to autocomplete that helps you quickly get to certain communities and people profiles more quickly. Just type any letter in the search bar and you’ll see suggestions for specific communities and people profiles:

How can I see what's trending on Reddit?

Want to see what other people on Reddit are talking about? Simply clicking on the search bar will give you a list of the top 4 most searched for things on Reddit in the last few hours:

If you click on any of these items, you’ll be taken to a special page that has all of the top posts, communities, and people related to that topic. You can also find this on the r/popular feed.

trending searches on r/popular

Features To Try Out

Search Post’s Comments

You can search within the comments of a particular post by clicking on the search icon in the header whenever you’re on a post. On the desktop site, this search bar is by the comments section, below the comment box.

Flair Search

Did you know you can scope your searches even further? When you see tags like this, try clicking on one! This is helpful if you’re interested in a specific topic within a subreddit (e.g. I want to learn about all things related to “Physics” in r/ Science)

extracurricular flair

Post flair search for the flair ‘Physics’ conducted in r/Science

Search within communities

You can easily scope your search to specific subreddits or multireddits/custom feeds by simply searching while on a post or a community page. (You should see a pill icon appear in the search bar that tells you what subreddit you’re searching within).

Searching within a community from a post detail page

Searching within a community from a community page

If you want to search across all of Reddit again, simply delete the pill, and start typing your new search!

Manual Filtering

If you want to limit your search to a specific set of criteria, you can use these special manual filtering words to do so.

Make sure you don’t have whitespace between the manual filter name(e.g. ‘author’) and the word you want to search for:

✅ author:cats
❌ author: cats

Example: If I want to search for things related to ‘search updates’ written by author u/reddit within a specific subreddit r/ToTheMoon, I would input the following in the search bar:

author:reddit subreddit:ToTheMoon search updates

• author The user who submitted the post.
  For example, author:PresidentObama
  
• flair The text of the link flair on the post.
  For example, flair:cats
  
• self Filter by text post. Set to true to filter to only text posts, false otherwise.
  For example, self:true
  
• selftext The body of the post.
  For example, selftext:cats
  
• site The domain of the submitted URL.
  For example, site:example.com
  
• subreddit The submission 's subreddit.
  For example, subreddit:cats
  
• title The submission title.
  For example, title:cats
  
• url The submission's URL (the website's address)
  For example url:cats
  

You can also search multiple fields at once. For example, cats subreddit:pics site:imgur.com

When making a multi-word field search, wrap the query in double or single quotes. For example, title:“kitten gif”.

Note: By default for Post Search we require some but not necessarily all words in the query to match for a post to be considered a match for your search. These special search syntax terms will allow you to override this and require a certain set of criteria.
For comments, and people all words in the query must currently match, though this might change in the future.

Safe Search

If you want to get NSFW results and you don’t see the Safe Search toggle on desktop, you’ll need to confirm you’re 18+ in your user settings (User Settings > Feed Settings > Adult Content) and turn off the Safe Search toggle. (Note: this feature is only available on desktop and is coming to iOS and Android soon)

Boolean operators and Grouping

You can specify whether you want your search terms to be inclusive or not.

• Reddit search supports the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT (case sensitive).
  
• Using AND between words requires all of the connected words to be in the search results
  E.g. Searching ‘cats AND dogs’ will return only results that have the word “cats” AND the word “dogs” in the results. ‘cats AND dogs AND toys’ returns results with all 3 words.
  
• Using OR between words only requires SOME words to match.
  E.g. Searching ‘cats OR dogs’ will return results that either have the word 'cats' OR the word 'dogs' in them.
• Using NOT between words requires certain words NOT to match.
  E.g. Searching ‘cats NOT dogs’ will return results that have the word “cats,” but NOT results that have the word “dogs”
  
• Using parentheses ( ) groups parts of a search together.
  
• You might sometimes get unexpected results if you’re using multiple boolean operators. You can force a specific behavior using (). For example, hedgehog NOT sonic OR shadow returns very different results than hedgehog NOT (sonic OR shadow)

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