Why You No Longer Need to Add Reddit to Your Google Searches
Reddit has long been a popular place for interesting articles, funny memes, and insightful, civil debates with people who hold the same opinions as you. The site is so popular that many of us simply add “Reddit” to the end of a Google search, convinced that we have a better chance of finding an answer on the site than on the rest of the Internet.
This doesn’t actually work if you’re using another major search engine like Bing : As it turns out, Reddit has limited the search engines in which you can find Reddit results, mainly Google . But since Google is by far the most popular search engine on the Internet, many of us have found success with these Reddit additions. Reddit is well aware of this trend and doesn’t want you to do it anymore – at least the company doesn’t want you to worry about a search engine like Google at all.
The company is launching a new search tool called Reddit Answers , which uses artificial intelligence (it’s 2024, after all) to provide detailed results for user queries. However, this isn’t a simple search feature: You don’t have to type a query, hit enter, and then sift through a sea of posts on the subreddit to find what you’re looking for. Instead, when you search for something, Reddit Answers generates a complete summary to answer your question, complete with headings and bullets—all based on Reddit content, of course. Each item is accompanied by a hyperlink to the Reddit post from which the answer was taken. When you click the link, the post opens in the sidebar, so you don’t have to leave the summary to check it out.
Reddit first reported that it was working on its own AI summary feature back in August , so it’s not surprising. The feature itself is very reminiscent of other AI adders, including Google’s own AI Reviews , which crawl the Internet to generate a generalized answer to your query. (Those in the know know how rocky this initial rollout was .)