No matter what you might use Reddit for at the moment, you’re likely to see changes coming to the platform in the coming months. CEO Steve Huffman, speaking during the company’s latest earnings call, has said that the website will expand its role as a search engine.
The mechanism the company will use for this is a combination of its Answers offering and large language model (LLM) integration. It makes a kind of sense — the website’s users often share specific information about queries pertinent to a particular subreddit, be it gaming, tech support, or how to wash a pair of shoes.
Reddit, search
“We’re concentrating our resources on the areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs, improving the core product, making Reddit a go-to search engine, and expanding internationally,” said Huffman. There’s little room for interpretation here — the company intends to take on Google, Bing, and other established engines in the never-ending search for more web traffic.
“Our focus right now is on unifying the Reddit search, like traditional search…which is very widely used [on the platform]…and the new Reddit Answers product … we’re unifying those into a single search experience, and we’re going to bring that front and center in the app,” he added.
How that will go is anyone’s guess, but the company is keen to give it a shot. How it will differentiate between popular shitposting and relevant, useful information remains to be seen. Perhaps its AI will sift through the mountains of crap effectively, or perhaps it’ll regurgitate the worst the internet’s front page has to offer. We’ll see.
