The guide
How to search Reddit like a pro
Reddit's search box is more capable than it looks. With a few operators you can find the exact conversations you need, whether that is research, support or customers asking for a product like yours.
Search posts, comments, communities or users
Every Reddit search can return posts, comments, communities or people. Posts are the default. Comments are where most recommendations happen: a post asks "what should I use?", and the answers sit in the comments. Communities finds subreddits by name and description, and Users finds accounts.
Use operators to narrow post searches
Operators only work without a space after the colon: author:name, not author: name. Put multi-word values in quotes, like title:"best crm". Combine as many as you like, for example crm subreddit:smallbusiness self:true NOT hiring. AND, OR and NOT must be in capitals or Reddit treats them as ordinary words.
Sort and time filters
Sort by New to find conversations you can still join, Top to see what the community upvoted most, and Most comments for the liveliest debates. Combine Top with "Past year" to find the threads people keep returning to. Comment searches sort by relevance, top or new only.
When Google beats Reddit search
Reddit's search tends to favour recent posts and can miss exact phrases. Google indexes old threads well, and Reddit threads often rank on Google's first page for buying-intent searches: in our study of 19,410 Reddit threads ranking on Google, 69% were more than six months old. For evergreen threads, Google is often the better tool.