How to Search Reddit Effectively

How to Search Reddit for Subreddits, Users, and Posts

If you want to search all around Reddit not minding whether you are looking for a subreddit or for a post you can make use of the search bar.

Type what you want to see in the search bar and press Enter to search. When you make use of the search bar, Reddit would pull up users, subreddits, and posts that contain the term that you searched for. For example, if you search for “programming,” you will find the subreddit /r/programming, as well as every post on Reddit that has “cats” in the title.

If you want to search just subreddits, you can make use of the subreddit page. This is also used for managing the subreddits you follow, but it also comes with a search box exclusively for finding new communities.

How to Search Reddit Using Modifiers and Operators

You can also use the following modifiers as mentioned in Reddit’s advanced search:

1. title: [text] searches only post titles.
2. author: [username] this is used to search for only posts by the given username.
3. selftext: [text] this searches for only the body of the posts that were made as self-posts.
4. subreddit: [name] this searches for only posts that were submitted to the particular subreddit community.
5. URL: [text] this searches only the URL of non-self-post posts.
6. site: [text] searches only the domain name of non-self-post posts.
7. NSFW: yes or NSFW: no is used to filter the results that are based on whether the content is marked as NSFW or not.
8. self: yes or no is used to filter the results that are based on whether they were self-posts or not.

You can also make use of boolean operators to better refine your search.

1. AND is used when you want both sides to be true.
2. OR is used when one side needs to be true.
3. You can make use of parentheses () to group together modifiers together in the situation that the search query is a complex mixture of ANDs and ORs.
4. You can also negate/exclude some particular modifiers by preceding them with a – (minus sign).

How to Search Within a Subreddit

If you want to search for a subreddit, you can make use of the subreddit search modifier that we mentioned above. However, there is a much easier way that will save you a little amount of time.

For example, let us say you are browsing a subreddit and you are not finding what you have in mind. Instead of you browsing until you find it, you can search only within the subreddit you’re on. To do this, you can do what you want to look for inside the search bar.

If you are using the old Reddit, simply click on the checkbox that is under the search box which says “limit my search to [subreddit name]”. When you hit Enter, only results from that subreddit will appear.

If you are making use of the new Reddit design, however, you would not see a tickbox. Instead, just search the term as if you are searching for the whole website. Then, on the results page, you can on the link that says “show results from [subreddit name]”.