reddit search

reddit search allows you to search for submissions and subreddits.

Submissions

The search page for submissions is at http://www.reddit.com/search. You can also search from the sidebar of most reddit pages.

Searching from a specific section of reddit — such as a subreddit, personal multireddit, or temporary multireddit — can limit your search results to that section.

Fielded search

You can search for these parts of a submission:

• title: The submission title.
  For example, title:cats
• author: The user who submitted the post.
  For example, author:PresidentObama
• selftext: For self-posts, the body of the post.
  For example, selftext:cats
• subreddit: The submission's subreddit.
  For example, subreddit:cats
• url: The submission's URL (the website's address).
  For example, url:cats
• site: The domain of the submitted URL.
  For example, site:example.com
• nsfw: Whether the post is NSFW.
  Set to yes for NSFW submissions, no otherwise. 1 and 0 are also supported.
  For example, nsfw:no or nsfw:0
• self: Whether nor not the submission is a text post.
  Set to yes for text posts, no otherwise. 1 and 0 are also supported.
  For example, self:yes or self:1
• flair: The text of the link flair on the post.
  For example, flair:cats
• You can also search multiple fields at once.
  For example, cats title:standing site:imgur.com

Field names are case sensitive.

Comments are not included in the search index at this time.

Boolean operators

reddit search supports the boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT (or minus -).

• By default, the search will use the AND operator.
  For example, hedgehogs AND porcupines and hedgehogs porcupines are equivalent
• You can use the OR operator when you want to match submissions that contain either term.
  For example, hedgehogs OR porcupines
• You can exclude terms with the NOT operator or -.
  For example, hedgehogs NOT porcupines or hedgehogs -porcupines
• You can use parentheses ( ) to group parts of a search together.
  For example, (hedgehogs OR porcupines) NOT sonic

Boolean operators are case sensitive.

Phrase search

Currently, phrase search is not supported.

Cloudsearch Syntax

This is a much more advanced and technical search and is detailed below for who are interested or might need it, normally the above techniques (called Lucene syntax) will be enough to find what you would like.

Amazon Cloudsearch Syntax allows very advanced search queries. For programmers and advanced users who want to dig deeper you can find a complete description in the Developer's Guide at Amazon and see how reddit constructs search queries into cloudsearch syntax in the common.py file on github.

You'll see your query converted to this syntax when you mouse over the "δ" icon near upper right of the search box. It will show you something like the following converted query to cloudsearch syntax: (and (field title 'party') (field text 'beatles'))

When invoked manually its most common use is to return searches between two time periods using unix timestamps. You can transform the beginning and end date & time of the period you wish to search into unix timestamps using this website: http://www.epochconverter.com/ . The format goes as timestamp:1373932800..1474019200 where the first is the beginning of the time period, and the 2nd number is the ending time period. Those unix time stamps will return results from between Jul 16,2013 and Sep,16,2016. After doing your search you must put &syntax=cloudsearch in the address bar at the end of the url and hit return in order to enable this feature, as it is disabled by default.

More usage scenarios and examples in the context of reddit can be found in this post

To see it in action here is a link that searches /r/MusicGuides between July 04,2013 & July 05,2013 timestamp:1372982400..1373068800
Notice the &syntax=cloudsearch at the end of the url which enables the timestamp searching feature.

And here is a similar query for between July 04,2013 & July 05,2016 but only searches for those results that have "music" in the title (and timestamp:1373932800..1474019200 title:'music').
Cloudsearch syntax requires the terms to be in parenthesis have the and at the beginning inside.

Tip: Since search results are limited to 1000 results, you can divide your query into different time periods to get past this limit using Cloudsearch Syntax.

Limitations and caveats

• Search terms may be stemmed. A search for "dogs" may return results with the word "dog" in them.
• Search results are limited to 1000 results.
• Searching for phrases doesn't seem to work.
• Bug: When searching for a word that includes a symbol, it will get split into multiple words without the symbol. As a result, there may be many extraneous search results returned.

Subreddits

You can search for subreddits from the subreddits page at https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/search.

Subreddit results also appear at the top of the main search page at https://www.reddit.com/search.

Staying up to date (RSS)

If you want to stay up to date on a search result, you can subscribe to that search's RSS feed. All you need to do is add .rss to the search URL, and add it to your news reader. For example, this is the RSS feed for the "cats" search results:

https://www.reddit.com/search.rss?q=cats&sort=new&restrict_sr=&t=all

Search API

See the api documentation for a list of supported url parameters.

https://www.reddit.com/search.json?q=cats

Enabling legacy search

If you would prefer to use the older version of the search page, you can enable it from your preferences.

Questions

Please direct any questions about search to the /r/help subreddit. If you've found a bug, you may report it to the /r/bugs subreddit.

Check /r/beta for search features currently under beta testing.