Is Reddit the next big search engine?

By Tuukka Tähtinen

January 3rd, 2025

Reddit is a big deal, let's do a little summary of it all first:

• Reddit is home to over 140,000 active subreddits, making it a hub for discussions on nearly any topic imaginable, with content often based on firsthand user experiences.

• The platform’s keyword-focused search is straightforward and precise, but it doesn’t interpret search intent like Google, which can limit its effectiveness for broader inquiries.

• While Reddit excels at offering opinions, reviews, and niche insights, it is primarily user-driven content that may lack citations or evidence, requiring extra scrutiny for accuracy.

• Reddit Answers is a soon to be AI-powered add-on to the platform, which promises to assist the user to find more accurate and personalized information faster.

• With new posts no longer indexed by most search engines since mid-2024, accessing Reddit's latest content often requires direct use of its search functionality or Google.

• Reddit remains a powerful tool for specific queries and user sentiment but is unlikely to replace traditional search engines for comprehensive or fact-based research anytime soon.

But will Reddit become the next big search engine? It’s a question that pops up time and time again. Often the information we seek is readily available on Reddit with multiple first hand accounts. And now with reddit disallowing most search engines from indexing the site for new posts to combat training of AI, and searches often resulting in articles that are based off of reddit posts and comments, why not go straight to the source?

• In this post:

Should you use Reddit as your primary search engine?

The slogan of Eeddit used to be “Front page of the internet”, and for a good reason. With more than 500 million users and 140 thousand active subreddits, there’s a lot of traffic and content throughout the site. With reddit posts made after July 2024 no longer being indexed by other search engines than Google, you may want to consider using reddit as a search engine alone to find more recent information.

But should you?

The content you find on Reddit is just that, content on Reddit.

The downside of using Reddit as an information source is that you’re going to be dependant on other users posting all of the information. However with information being concentrated on a per-subject basis you can be exposed to a larger pool of information if you know where to look, but you will likely miss out on some information due to any number of causes such as content moderation or an article or post never being posted at all.

If you were to use Reddit as your sole source of information you could miss out on other valuable sources of information like forums and news publications, while those posts would likely have been indexed by traditional search engines. On the other hand, Reddit does generate discussions around popular topics more than you’d find under an article directly on a publications page.

And at the end of the day, Reddit is still mainly a social media platform and eventually you will need to filter through false and biased information. You can often see an article posted on Reddit and the source for that article will end up being a comment or post on Reddit. Answers and information will often be provided without citations and you’ll often be working with opinions of users, which can be valuable in many cases but can also pollute the pool of information. Some of the more science based communities will usually moderate these unverified posts but the more “casual” or smaller communities may leave these up.

Introducing Reddit Answers

In December 2024, Reddit announced that they are developing a new, AI-powered conversation interface to help users find more accurate results faster. As Reddit is all about people and real discussions, Reddit Answers promises to just support that. It's a tool that facilitates the way users find information on Reddit. The user may place a few keywords in the search bar, and Reddit provides discussion threads that are relevant to that. It remains to be seen how Reddit Answers will develop, as it seems it is very much in a demo phase, and soon, a limited numbers of U.S. users will get to test it. However, this add-on is interesting because it could change Reddit forever and totally revamp the usability.

The search functionality on Reddit is good for short, accurate searches, not so great for determining search intent

Searches can often get vastly different results when searching directly on Reddit versus searching site:Reddit.com on Google. This is partly due to the fact that Google search will try to decipher intent from your search while Reddit by default will keep to the given keywords. This can be great when looking for specific information, but can hinder your results when trying to find information about a general topic without specific keywords.

You can improve your search experience somewhat by manually adjusting your search parameters and formatting. Searching for ‘red cars’ will result in posts including the words “red” and “cars” while searching for ‘“red cars”,’ surrounded by quotes, will result in posts including the phrase “red cars”.

A positive side of using Reddit’s search feature is that there are currently no ads sprinkled with the search results. All advertising on Reddit is on the main feed and under the contents of a opened post.

Google already prioritize Reddit results over other blogs and forums

There has been a rise in marketing bloat blog posts in the recent years that take a comment or post from social media and churn them into articles. You may also have noticed that in recent years Google has become more inclined towards displaying results from Reddit at the top, but why is that?

Because users prefer to see them.

Users looking for solutions, product opinions or reviews generally want to ask a question and have that question answered. Reddit is a better option for that.

Reddit is compact, you get your information and you get out. No scrolling through a thousand word blog post about “How to fix Error 627b in 3 steps” that was based off of a 3 paragraph Reddit post by “u/RORfixer”. You may sometimes need to read through some of the comments in addition to the original post when gathering an idea about the general sentiment, but this is still a preferable option to users.

Users dislike the excessive blog posts and articles, and have opted to instead search for specifically Reddit posts for their solutions, and as a result Google is now also more likely to push those pages to the top of their search results.

Also, Reddit can feel genuine and unbiased. The information there is provided from users to other users. It could be that people don't trust marketers, companies, and other content creators with their information like they used to.

A side effect with traditional search engine indexing is that every time a post receives a new comment, the last updated date of the post is updated. This causes old posts to appear to have been posted more recently in search results which depending on the comment, could bump up an outdated solution or add a new aspect of discussion to an old topic.

Future of Reddit as a search engine

While Reddit has become increasingly more popular among the younger generations, it is still a fairly niche platform among the 30+ demographic and I don’t expect this to change. The younger generations will keep using Reddit and it will likely keep gaining popularity for a while as more and more communities form subreddits instead of traditional forums, and the older generations will mostly keep to traditional media such as news and blogs to an extent.

While the younger generation is more inclined to use Reddit as a social media platform, they are also more likely to use AI powered tools, and I suspect, they are also likely to remain on Google for their custom Gemini AI model or move to Bing to take advantage of Copilot.

Especially with Google being the industry giant they are, owning 91.47% search engine market share as of January 2024, even after constant discourse surrounding Google search result quality becoming worse each year, it is difficult to imagine a future where Reddit is capable of gaining a meaningful market share without drastic changes or technical breakthroughs. The ongoing antitrust proceedings against Google in the browser and search engine space could lead to changes in the browser and search engine market, but with the first remedies trial not being held until April 2025, that remains to be seen.

But since Google is currently the only search engine that is allowed to index Reddit, there is technically space for the market to shift towards Reddit search in the remaining ~9% of the market share.

Alternatively, Reddit's popularity could be approaching it's peak. It may be that the next generation won't interact with the internet the same way as we do and will instead move to another form of forum-esque information hub. We can already see this happening. While some communities are created on Reddit, some communities are created on Discord instead and similarly to how traditional forums have mostly died and moved to Reddit, the same could happen to Reddit in the future.

Closing thoughts

Like most things in life, there are pros and cons to using Reddit for searching up information online. For opinions and reviews it is likely the largest database on the internet, but for actual evidence backed information you’re going to have to do some digging. While Reddit does hold a vast amount of communities and information that can be used to expand your view on a subject, but like everywhere else on the internet, it is essential to be aware of biases. This is especially true on Reddit as communities can often become echo chambers so it is paramount to read up on a subject across multiple communities.

I don’t imagine we’ll be moving to use Reddit as our main search engine anytime soon, but it can be a useful addition to your search routine when researching user sentiment or a larger topic, especially when not using Google as your search engine.

Time will tell.