Key Takeaways
- Reddit Answers offers curated summaries of Reddit conversations for quicker insights and allows follow-up questions.
- Reddit’s partnership with Google for AI training on Reddit comments may have influenced the development of this search tool.
- The new Reddit search tool efficiently scans for relevant answers and provides prompts, potentially revolutionizing Reddit’s search engine.
The introduction of powerful, easy-to-use AI has bled over into every aspect of our lives. Even search engines are now using AI to quickly summarize search results and speed up the research process — if only they worked correctly. Tools like Google’s AI Overview are fast, but they’re often inaccurate. In spite of these advances, most people still resort to their tried-and-true favorite way to search: typing something into Google and then adding the word “Reddit” after it. However, Reddit seemingly isn’t a fan of that, so it has introduced its own AI-powered search function that dives into Reddit threads to find answers.
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Reddit Answers provides “curated summaries of relevant conversations and details across Reddit,” according to the site’s blog post revealing the update. What makes this useful isn’t just that it can sort through irrelevant content and help you find what you need more quickly but also that you can jump into the conversations and ask follow-up questions for more clarification. The feature is currently rolling out to a limited number of users in the United States, although Reddit hasn’t been clear about who qualifies to try it out (I’m in Atlanta, and it isn’t live here yet). Anyone interested can go to the Reddit Answers site and sign up to be notified when the tool is available in your area.
A better search tool for Reddit
Google and Reddit formed a partnership earlier this year to train Google’s AI on Reddit comments. The idea is that Reddit is one of the best sources for AIs to pull information from due to its up-to-the-minute nature, versus the risk of a language model pulling results from a website that’s years out of date. It’s possible that Reddit used the opportunity to begin work on its own AI, but it’s also possible that this announcement was just coincidental timing; after all, it seems like every company out there is introducing an AI tool in one form or another.
The tool will work by scanning Reddit for the most relevant answers to your question, but if you don’t have anything in particular to ask, the tool suggests prompts for you to try. It’s a powerful feature that could be used for everything from essay research to finding the solution to a really obscure hardware bug. The service is still in its early days, so things could change over time — but this tool holds a lot of promise that could revolutionize Reddit’s notoriously awful search engine.
