How to search a subreddit (and where Reddit search stops)

How to search in a subreddit

• On a computer. Open the subreddit and click the search bar. The community name appears in the bar as a pill, which means the search covers only that subreddit. Type your words and press Enter. To widen the same search, click Show results from all of Reddit.
• In the Reddit app. Open the subreddit and tap the search bar on its page; the search is limited to that community in the same way. On a post, tap the search icon to search that post's comments. Tap a flair tag on any post to see every post with that flair.
• From anywhere. Type subreddit: and the name with no space, then your words: subreddit:personalfinance emergency fund. This is the same filter, and it is the one to use when you want to add others.

Reddit search filters

Reddit documents eight filter words in Available search features. Each one narrows a post search to a single field.

• No space after the colon: author:cats works, author: cats does not.
• Put two or more words in quotes: title:"kitten gif".
• Combine as many as you need: cats subreddit:pics site:imgur.com.
• In post search, results only need some of your words unless a filter forces a match. In comment search, every word has to be there.

AND, OR and NOT in a subreddit search

• subreddit:SaaS pricing AND churnBoth words must be in the result.
• subreddit:SaaS pricing OR churnEither word is enough.
• subreddit:SaaS pricing NOT hiringDrops results that mention hiring.
• subreddit:SaaS pricing NOT (hiring OR job)Parentheses group words. Without them, several operators in one query can return something you didn't expect.

AND, OR and NOT only work in capital letters; Reddit says the operators are case sensitive.

Sorts and the time filter

Post results sort five ways (What filters and sorts are available?):

• Relevance. The default. Weighs how rare each word is, the post's age, and its votes and comments.
• Hot. Posts that are getting upvotes and comments right now.
• Top. Posts with the most upvotes and comments. Works with the time filter.
• New. Newest first, whatever the votes.
• Comment count. Posts with the most comments, for the biggest discussions.

• The time filter has six settings: all time, past year, past month, past week, past 24 hours and past hour.
• Only Relevance looks at how rare your words are. With Top or New, a result can rank high just for containing your most common word, so use quotes or AND to keep the rare one.
• Comment results sort by Relevance, Top or New.

Subreddit search: finding subreddits to search

Many people who type “subreddit search” want the opposite: to find which subreddits exist for a topic, and only then search inside one. Reddit covers this in two places. Start typing in the search bar and it suggests communities and profiles by name. Run a full search and open the Communities results to see subreddits that match your words.

Both look at names. To see which subreddits about a topic are actually active, the free Subreddit finder looks for your word in subreddit names and descriptions and lists each match with its members and posts per month, with no sign-up. More free tools are on the free tools page.

Where Reddit search stops

• No date range. The time filter goes back from today: an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, or all time. There is no setting for a past month such as March 2019.
• A list, not a count. Search returns matching posts. It doesn't tell you how often a phrase came up each month or in which subreddits it comes up most.
• Comments are stricter. A comment has to contain every word you typed, so long queries quickly return nothing.
• Result lists end. Through Reddit's API, most listings hold at most 1,000 items, served 100 at a time, according to the PRAW documentation.
• One community or all of Reddit. To search a handful of subreddits together, add them to a custom feed and search the feed; Reddit supports searching custom feeds the same way as communities.

Google is another route. Its site: operator accepts a path (Google Search Central), so site:https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/ pricing keeps results to one subreddit, ranked by Google rather than Reddit. It finds pages Google has indexed, not every comment.

Search a phrase across all subreddits since 2005

When the question is “how often, since when, and where”, a list of posts is the wrong shape. KissMyPost Historical search takes a phrase of up to three words and searches posts back to June 2005 and comments back to December 2005, across all of Reddit. It reports mentions month by month, the subreddits where the phrase comes up, how many different people are behind it, and the matching posts or comments, sorted newest, top or most replies.

It does not replace the steps above for one subreddit: the interface searches all of Reddit and shows a subreddit breakdown rather than filtering to one community, and it works in months, not days.

Historical search is part of every KissMyPost plan, a search with no matches costs nothing, and any plan can be tried for $1 for one day. How Historical search works

How to search a subreddit: questions