Reddit Advanced Search

• Reddit is "The Dive Bar": People are anonymous, honest, and often critical. They ask the questions here they would be too embarrassed to ask on LinkedIn.
• Best for: Unfiltered product reviews, technical troubleshooting, and finding "pain points."

Reddit search rules

• Field filters: Search in specific fields by prefixing with field:value. Supported fields include:
  • author:username – posts by that user. Example: author:reddit finds posts by u/reddit.
  • flair:flair_text – posts with that flair. Example: flair:news.
  • self:true or self:false – restrict to text posts (true) or exclude them (false).
  • selftext:word – searches text body. Example: selftext:cats finds posts whose body contains "cats".
  • site:domain.com – restricts to posts linking to that domain (via shared URLs).
  • subreddit:name – restrict to that subreddit. Example: subreddit:news.
  • title:words – searches words in the post title. Example: title:"broken keyboard".
  • url:words – searches the URL of linked posts. Example: url:google.com.
• Boolean operators: Reddit's search supports AND, OR, NOT (capitalized) and grouping with parentheses:
  • AND requires all terms (usually implicit). Example: cats AND dogs returns posts with both terms.
  • OR requires at least one of the terms. Example: cats OR dogs returns posts with either term.
  • NOT excludes terms. Example: cats NOT dogs returns posts with "cats" but not "dogs"
  • Parentheses can group queries to force precedence. Example: chef NOT (cake OR pastry)

Additional search query guidelines

• Avoid limiting the search to subreddits
• Try to find search queries that are just specific enough to yield what we are looking for yet not too specific to exclude potential relevant conversations (for example, searching for specific phrases, e.g. putting multiple words in quotes will only give the conversations that have that exact formulation and that might be too limiting)
• Try to keep search keywords and phrases generally available, e.g. avoid filters like self or title unless you know exactly what you are doing and why
• A search query can have only limited characters (e.g. 128), so be mindful of large queries

Good examples

• ("find* clients" AND ("app" OR "tool")) -commission -freelance will find people who are looking for clients, likely in an app or tool context. It will further exclude freelance or commission based posts