Official information from Reddit, Inc. on minor updates and bug fixes applied to Reddit.
Improving search
Hi everyone,
As u/bitofsalt mentioned a few months ago, we’ve been working on some improvements to search. We may even be ahead of spez’s 10 year plan.
In any case, the changes we’re rolling out are focused on the underlying search technology stack. The main noticeable difference will be that you’ll actually be able to find the things you’re looking for. Other than that, there won’t be much change to the experience.
We’ll begin the rollout today with a small percentage of traffic to ensure a smooth scaling experience.
Some small things to note when you receive the new experience:
-
To retrieve NSFW results on desktop web, you’ll need to check the checkbox that enables NSFW results which will be right next to the search box. On mobile, you’ll need to visit your user preferences and change the preference labeled “show not safe for work (NSFW) content in search results”
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Searching by link flair now requires the full flair text string to return expected results. For example to search for posts with link flair of “Test post” you would search flair:”Test post”. Searching flair:”Test” would not return results under this new search.
Cheers,
EDIT: formatting
EDIT 2: I've been told subtext search in flair should be fixed now
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please enable sorting by "old" / "oldest" on search results
Added this to our requests; thanks smohqe.
thank you! wanted to find old/first posts for some of the smaller subs I'm in. gave up after 8 pages or so.
Can we please have a default for searching by new and not "relevant"?
"relevant" doesn't actually bring up the most relevant newest post. So the search has to be run again.
I'm super curious about usage and expectations here, this will definitely be something we will measure and experiment with. Balancing recency with relevance is a tricky thing and likely different based on user's intent (trying to find a post they saw recently vs. a more relevant/hotter one but older).
In r/cordcutters, we have alot of self posts and news stories about new services and improvements. The problem is if you sort by relevant, you get outdated posts about old products or streaming services. If the topic was highly controversial, then an old post will be "hotter." For example searching "Hulu" by relevant brings up old news from more than a year ago about them discontinuing a free ad supported website (very hot topic then but of no use now), but not any of the recent posts about its new "Hulu with Live TV" service or its new UI on various platforms. Every search I have tried I get very old posts. Secondly, if you are trying to post a news story and want to make it has not been posted, you want New not Relevant. The same issue applies to several other subs I moderate. Subscribers want the most timely, up to date info. How "hot" it is isn't likely a consideration.
Yes, I know you can rerun the search but on a tablet or mobile device, it's tricky sometimes to access the drop-down menus. They just don't open well without a mouse.
As a mod, if I am trying to find a post by a particular subscriber, I usually want the newest post.
And I don't know whether this needs to be a user preference. If it were, I would always set a preference to default to new but maybe others would want oldest instead.
Was...was that not already part of the plan?
heheh I kinda had the same reaction. stoked to get a response though!
including some sort of functional date filter would be fantastic. I know that you can convert to epoch timestamps, but that's hugely inconvenient.
Feedback taken; sounds like there's a few folks with a similar ask.
Quite a few. The silent masses are large.
Can confirm, I'm one of those who would love this but have to make do with the cloudsearch syntax for now.
This has been asked for going quite a long time back
We started building our dedicated search team this year, first up is replacing the stack with a highly available and relevant one we can built upon, up next is iterating on improving that stack and adding requests as well as brand new search experiences.
Can you talk a little bit about the tech stack?
We've planned to write a detailed post about the underlying tech as part of the rollout.
Is there an ETA for this?
Unfortunately, no. It's not even a question of transparency; it's just that as we're rolling out, we discover new edge cases, and we have to examine them case by case to see if we can proceed or if we must block on fixing various issues. This is because we don't know 100% how people are using our API, or even what they're using our API for. But Real Soon Now (TM). :-(
Thanks! Super excited!
Yessir; there'll be a blog post on this soon.
Hijacking this to mention an important difference that's buried further down: it's no longer on cloudsearch, which means those clever date-based searches will no longer work.
RIP
More duct tape on the search box.
Upgraded from Scotch Tape.
I didn't know you can get paid to shitpost
That's what most of us are doing at work all day long; it's just other employers footing the bill.
Making a relevant and actually funny joke is not shitposting. It's almost the exact opposite.
We're adding staples to the search box.
Tomorrow on blogs worldwide:
The new DTS stack
How far will duct tape and staples bring our search algorithms in the future?
Have you considered adding Super Glue to the search box?
Is there a way we can narrow the timeframe of a search? Jumping from 1 month to 1 year is rather a big jump.
Had a few folks ask about date filters; I've added this request to our backlog.
Amen, and this in general is a big issue with just general sorting on reddit too. You can view top posts of the week, the month and then suddenly you're at year and after that, all time! I wish I could see each years top, or each months top.
Adding onto that, it would be super nice if these date filters also made their way into viewing subreddits (in the "top" tab).
I am a web developer, and I've been doing this for a while, so I am ecstatic when I see that you guys are doing things like fixing the search so that it works.
I can even get behind the fact that you fixed search in such a way that it breaks the one thing that we have previously been using seach for, because at least search is going to work.
Where we, as moderators, have a problem is when you do these things without even a day's worth of notice. Rolling out a change like this without giving moderators any advance notice so that they can find and fix the issues in advance is a problem. It might even be THE problem that moderators have with admins.
Please, please, please, please, can someone at Reddit HQ get in a place like r/ModSupport and share the development roadmap with a whole bunch of moderators? I know that you guys are doing the development, but we are doing all the crappy grunt work and we are constantly being left in the lurch.
To sum up: great work with search! Thank you. It's okay that we have to change flair! We'll deal with it. For crying out loud, can you please share these changes with us a little bit before they happen.
UPDATE: We've added support to the new stack for subtext search within flair text; will be updating the post shortly to reflect this, thanks for the feedback which helped us prioritize this work!
I am excited that you've done these search improvements; I know that search is a difficult and often unfun problem, which is a poor combination to have to work on. It's great that you listened to some of the technical issues that people were having with what you had implemented, and found a way to fix them.
The main issue, and why many moderators may have seemed frustrated or angry: mods were not told what was happening. Changes were made to Reddit, and then mods got mad, and you had to scramble to make changes to what you were doing in the midst of the deployment. I don't think anybody, admins or mods, want that to happen.
What I don't understand is why development would be done like this. Planning is worth ten times as much when it comes before implementation. You yourself mentioned the roadmap and the backlog, so we know that at least there is some concept of "having a plan for reddit's development" there somewhere at Reddit HQ. It's bad for admins because developers do not want to develop that way. Nobody wants to be mid deployment and be told to change how they're doing what they are deploying, and no moderator wants to have things changed without knowing how things are going to change. So please, hear my request, because I think you misunderstood my feedback from yesterday:
When something gets to the top of the backlog and you are figuring out the nitty gritty of how development is going to be done, that is the time at which you need to have these conversations with moderators. When you have reached the point that you are deploying something because you've finished a feature, if you haven't already told the moderators that something is happening, you are sending the message that moderators have no value. Whether you think that moderators have value or not, that is the message that we receive when you wait until deployment to tell us about features.
Please just share with us what you're going to work on next, and ask us how we currently use the tool that you're working on. Then we can have conversations like "Hey, we really use partial matches for flair a lot" and you can actually plan to support it, instead of making assumptions about how people use things. Then you can say, "We're not going to support partial flair matches, and the release date for this is 2 weeks away." Moderators may grumble, but we'll have clear directions on where we're going.
You guys are burning through moderator good will. There are things that you're doing to at least slow the burn, but it is still eroding. You need to make changes to regain trust, and the primary thing that you need to do is effectively communicate to moderators about how moderation is going to change before it happens.
Please understand that when I say this, I'm trying to be constructive. I don't have any animosity to any of the admin/developers. Thanks for the work you did on this, and I'm super excited that the search is being fixed.
This is great and all, but what about u/aphoenix's point about communication? Especially when it's a change that breaks existing functionality and doesn't just affect mods but users as well. I'd imagine this has been in the works for a while, would there have been an issue with posting this a week ago and prefacing with "in a week this is going to happen"?
I echo my comment on his post, fair feedback, to clarify we haven't rolled this out to everyone and upon posting only 1% of users were in the experiment for us to start testing out scale here so there'll be more than that week timeframe before this is broadly rolled out. Still fair feedback in any case but wanted to make sure we clarified these rollout plans.
Also, to be fair to the devs, its a little hard to do a blind treatment test for comparison when you taint the exposure pool by telling them what you're doing.
This honestly needs to be higher up. It seems that every time a major change is made, this happens, reddit says "ok thanks for the feedback" but then it just continues to happen.
One admin seemed to completely misunderstand my point, and the other was like a textbook case of manager speak. :(
Thank you for expressing your frustration in a constructive way. Feedback expressed this way helps us to iterate not just on our software but also on our processes so that we can make improvements while minimizing pain moving forward.
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Quick, before you get switched over to new search, find all the inconsistent ones and re-flair them all to have the same text!
(I'm only partially joking, that might actually be the best thing to do)
MilkGames; you'll have to create different queries for the different flair types, or you'll also be able to use Boolean search (support just added in the new stack yesterday) to do something like flair:"Valve Response inside" OR flair:"Valve Responded.
Is it possible to insert a wildcard or run it as a startswith/contains search for flair?
UPDATE: We've added support to the new stack for subtext search within flair text; will be updating the post shortly to reflect this, thanks for the feedback which helped us prioritize this work!
Woo, I helped create a better Reddit!
For serious though, thank you for all the hard work you've been putting in to wrangle this monster. We appreciate what you do, even if we do take it with a bit of salt ;)
Not today; that would require us indexing that vs. treating it as a filter. We'll be looking at the ability to support this and impact on performance, but the ideal solution if you can do it is to switch to exact searches as you'll benefit from improved performance for the same results.
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Boo I get this all the time with my tracking system, people put dashes or underscores or no separator and then they get mad their data sucks.
Not sure why this change needs to be made, but I also ask that you reconsider if possible and allow partial matches for link flair searches. If stories change, we often use the flair to clarify [News] becomes [News: Misleading] or [Rumor] becomes [Rumor: False]. Trying to use OR statements to cover every possible permutation of flair is impossible and is especially frustrating when partial matches already work just fine. This is important functionality because it's impossible to change a headline and the only other alternative is to remove the thread which destroys the discussion in the comments.
Per the feedback on this thread, we're looking at the ability to support this. Searches will still be more performant on exact matches but we might be able to add this functionality to the new stack soon.
r/highqualitygifs extensively uses link flairs for the movie/tv show title used in the gif. in most cases the link title has no words from the title itself in it. now if you want to search for a gif that someone made you have to:
a) hope that op typed the movie/tv show title right without any spelling errors
b) hope that you type it right without any spelling errors
c) check for r/all and non r/all posts
search for gifs has become a lot harder now..
I agree. Also IMO "improvement" should add to functionality, this one removes functionality, u/bitofsalt.
We've got something in store to make searching for gifs/images/videos considerably easier... but in the meantime, we're looking at the ability to do subtext search within the flair text to help with this.
UPDATE: We've added support to the new stack for subtext search within flair text; will be updating the post shortly to reflect this, thanks for the feedback which helped us prioritize this work!
Tbh that is your problem, not Reddit's. How difficult can it be to agree on a single pre-made flair..
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Aah, I see.. that's an interesting scenario, you're right in the feedback. Thanks for explaining.
Yeah, it's an unfortunate workaround of only being able to set a single link flair for a post.
Can you develop a bot to tag this, so it's consistent?
They could write a script to retag the posts pretty easily.
How would you search based on flair class, would that be the same way?
Searching by css_class is being deprecated in the new stack; CSS should be a UI vs. a search thing, so you'll likely want to switch to searching the flair text instead.
Please don't do that. We use css_class as a way to implement filters in r/soccer. Flair text isn't flexible enough especially now that it is fussy about being a full match.
css_class isn't meant for post filtering unfortunately, it's a UI attribute and shouldn't have been surfaced by the cloudsearch stack. In what cases would flair text not work for? Would love to think through those and potential workarounds. For the full match, boolean search should help now and we are looking at feasibility of adding support for that in the new stack.
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/search?q=flair_css_class%3Amedia&sort=hot&restrict_sr=on&t=day&feature=legacy_search#res-hide-options
If you look at the results of that search then you can see standard video links mixed in with some Twitter videos. We prefer to label Twitter sources as either verified/unverified as that gives us the most value. But they can also be tagged with a css_class that identifies them as videos so that they still appear in the filter.
Yes it is, but CSS classes are supposed to have some semantic meaning too. Don't punish us for using them properly! :)
Ability to use empty flair text. You shouldn't need to suffix/prefix text to add searchable "metadata".
We have a daily thread for questions stickied to the top that has "daily thread" in the title. We use css to color the question threads so they're distinguished after the sticky is removed. We link to the search results when we need to point users to that thread via automoderator/sidebar/rules. We don't use flair text since the title is already long enough and there no point flairing it with "Daily" flair text since it's already in the title.
How is "flair_text" not also a UI attribute? Wouldn't they be defined in the same locations?
Agreed. Flair text should be nice and readable but the ability to tag (with classes) posts makes for a much more flexible filtering system.
Another example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/4qthea/nainggolan_scores_vs_wales_10/
That post has a "note" attached which says "Mirror in comments". It still has the css_class "media" so it will still appear in our Media filter. But the flair text is much more readable.
This doesn't work for us in r/ffxiv. We have weekly threads with one
weeklycss_class so we can easily list the topics for the users via search term, but the topics different so the flair title changes.reseph; I was taking a look at that sub but I'm not seeing a weekly flair class in your flair templates. Trying to understand your use case here to see what the workaround might be. Unfortunately flair_css isn't meant to be a post filtering feature which is driving this deprecation, but I'm hopeful we can find an alternative for you.
You can see it used in https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/wiki/automoderator-schedule
We automate a lot for consistency.
Sounds like you need to add more post filtering features, then. People have been begging for post tags since almost the inception of reddit.
Do we have a timeline for when this will stop working or can you at least give us notice BEFORE the depreciation happens along with the cutoff date once that is known and confirmed please?
The post says the new search is starting to roll out today, so the deprecation has already happened and you can no longer assume it will work. Zero advance notice for mods again.
I feel like we just went through this with them, too. It doesn't need to be a discussion, we just need notice.
AspectRatioPolice; very fair feedback. It's been a bit challenging with Search in particular, we actually had a much larger list of deprecated features due to the differences between the search stacks (boolean searches, nsfw handling, api compatibility amongst the few) and have been working to minimize that as much as possible given feedback from early testers before we roll out broadly (we're only at 1% today). We managed to get it down to these changes for now but will continue looking for ways to improve as we ramp up.
I don't know if I'm on the new search yet, but currently it's:
flair_css_class:classnameWhy didn't it work before. Like, on a technical level not on a I think you're bad at programming the site level...I know search is hard. (I probably won't understand the answer.)
WErner__Herzog; we outgrew the scalability of CloudSearch, and since it's a blackbox solution it's not something we didn't have much room to iterate on the actual Search UX there.
Does that mean Cloudsearch is no more? That you can't do searches using
&syntax=cloudsearch?Yes; that is correct. Cloudsearch no longer scales to our size and it's not feasible to try and translate their syntax over. In hindsight, it's likely not ideal to have surfaces search infra specific syntax at the end user level and having our own layer that we can translate to the appropriate infra underneath, but you'll be able to do boolean searches on the new stack as well for more advanced queries.
Can we still search by time periods? Nothing having cloudsearch will likely break a heavily used PRAW feature.
Edit: Looks like for the time being cloudsearch will continue to work via the API. Hopefully we'll have time to transition to a suitable alternative before it's removed from there.
That's the plan; we didn't want to change the underlying API given the backwards compatibility concerns, so instead we'll be versioning that endpoint and eventually deprecating the previous one after they overlap for enough time to give folks a chance to move over.
Woohoo! That's all I care about.
Will this 3-year-old bug be fixed, or are author searches for usernames with hyphens going to become impossible? I currently use CloudSearch because of that bug.
Is there any way to get a preview of the new search? If you could just push this account into the 1% test group I would be very grateful. I have programmatic bot/mod issues here and it's super inconvenient not to be able to figure out what problems the roll-out is going to cause in advance. (I understand that the API endpoint will still work, but the bot in question currently includes search links in its comments that users will click on.) Thanks!
I'm happy to report that your bug does not repro on our new stack! We don't have a way to opt in just yet, but are seeing great results as we scale up to more users so we should be rolling out more broadly very soon. If you have some example queries I'd be happy to test them out (feel free to PM them to me as well).
Thanks, BItofsalt.
My pleasure; we'll include some more details on our blog post around this once we write that as well, currently focused on the stack itself :)
Looks like a good change but I'm not too hot on the exact text search on flairs. Could that perhaps be optional?
pcjonathan; this is a requirement of our new stack and helps ensure high performance on those queries. You should be able to work around your cases here with boolean searches though which we added support for in the new stack just recently.
UPDATE: We've added support to the new stack for subtext search within flair text; will be updating the post shortly to reflect this, thanks for the feedback which helped us prioritize this work!
Hell, it's about damn time. But seriously, I'm glad to see further improvements to search. Every improvement is worth it!
I drink coffee out of your mug sometimes btw... drop by if you want it back :)
Ah, my old avatar mug? Pink jetpack/dragon? I miss that guy, but I did get an updated mug with my refreshed snoo that I got to keep :) Still, I think I may take you up on the offer!
That's the one! I like to think it's my lucky search mug.
Are you one of those people who only drinks out of former employees' mugs so you can leave them in conference rooms without getting blamed? >_>
I drink out of former employees mugs to feed on their life force; when I want to frame other's with dirty mugs I use an existing employees'...
Why's your Admin thing different from the others?
I no longer work for reddit :)
Did you get fired? What for?
Well this was long needed. I mostly used Google with site:reddit.com added before. So the improvment of the reddit search is very appreciated.
Couldn't agree more AskMeIfImAReptiloid (are you?).
Well, are you a reptiloid?
sometimes.
Holy shit, there's work being done on the search.
Sure is; we're hiring too! :)
I'd love the ability to be able to search by date, please. Or year. Or month. That would be incredibly helpful. Thank you very much.
Searching by a date range would be useful e.g. matches between date X and date Y
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We looked at doing this, but that preference isn't well managed today to be honest. If you click just a single time to get past the "over 18?" prompt screen because you wanted to look at a particular sub, we'll set that preference for you which means over time we end up with a lot of users having that enabled. Worry not though, we will respect your setting of this preference and persist it across platforms, it just won't impact your overall NSFW setting. We're also planning an overhaul of our settings soon.
It's a preference as well
until the change comes through I'll assume it'll work like the subreddit limit checkbox and remember your last setting
Yep! Slightly different implementation though, it'll sync across browsers if you're logged in.
We already have nsfw:yes as an option, will this be preserved?
Additionally, is support for OR operands being restored planned?
NSFW and boolean options will be preserved.
Sorry, that was unclear. The OR operand was removed the last time the search function was updated. I'd love if it were restored. We've still got the pipe(|) operand still works
OR or | will work. :-)
If I recall correctly that happened because by default reddit bypasses the l2cs library (which parses queries from lucene into cloudsearch, someone slowly) if the query doesn't contain any symbols. So if you actually did search on anything other than text (e.g.
subreddit:foo OR subreddit:bar) it'd work, butfoo OR barwouldn't.What the hell are people going to bitch about if you fix the search...?
; )
Modmail. Always modmail.
I think you underestimate people's creativity.
Most of the complaining these days is by people that have no idea how to use the current search (or much else besides the comment text box and the upvote arrows). The current search is actually fairly powerful if you know about all the fields, operators, and filters it offers. Many of these features are not exposed in the UI, but they are there nonetheless.
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Not yet, but it's definitely on our roadmap.
I've noticed that some approved yet reported submissions do not appear in search results.
Can you explain if this still happens, and why it happened originally?
Will the change in NSFW handling affect the API?
Currently the code makes an explicit exception for the API: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/52728820cfc60a9a7be47272ff7fb1031c2710c7/r2/r2/controllers/front.py#L1151
If it will affect the API, then how can NSFW searches be performed via the API while logged out?
We're not changing the API endpoint for search for the time being so we can maintain backwards compatibility there. In the future, we'll add a new endpoint for our new stack and over time deprecate the existing one so developers have a chance to move over. So in short, this shouldn't impact the above.
Oh nice. Just to clarify, will cloudsearch syntax continue to work via the API (for now)?
Yessir; we'll be versioning that endpoint in the future and deprecating the existing one after they overlap for enough time to give folks a chance to move over.
Do we get to see any of this code? It feels like as reddit is writing new software, it's going increasingly closed-source.
This search worked before and returned 14 results.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/search?q=%28and+timestamp:1293843661..1309478399%29&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all&syntax=cloudsearch
Now it returns ZERO results.
Please help.
See u/bitofsalt's comment here about cloudsearch no longer being usable:
It will still work via the API, but not through the regular reddit search interface.
Will we be getting search by flair CSS class back?
Thank you for this update. Now on to searchable modmail right? I knew it, thanks
love_the_heat; it is actually on our roadmap, no timeline yet though :)
:D
Yes please.
Sadly old modmail + Never Ending Reddit + CTRL+F is more searchable than the current new modmail implementation.
New modmail isn't searchable at all. It's actually awful on large subs.
Hello. It's me.
Bold claim to be sure.
We'll see if it's better than google.
We're testing it against Google results so we're keen to see that ourselves too!
We'll get there! (Perhaps not on the first iteration though.)
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Present
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The real question is though dafuq happened to the report dialogue? Supposedly not out of Beta yet every single community seems to be forced to use it (and it is horrible).
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6oi3jw/improvements_to_the_report_feature/
Released five days ago or so. It's ... different for sure. I think all the same options are there, but navigating through it feels like a choose your own adventure now which does not seem like the most effective thing unless you already know that clicking on A leads to where were formerly options A1, A2, and B3.
The big question though is why some change like that is not mentioned on r/changelog where it belongs.
I've argued in the past that all of this should be cross-posted to r/modnews because it has over 10x the subscribers, but was literally told by an Admin that mods are expected to read all the subs as well as search comment-reply trees for any further updates/announcements on that topic that develop during a discussion.
Maybe the new search feature will help us do that. But I agree that there can be a lot of overlap between the content in r/changelog and r/modnews. Ideally for posts like these there should be cross-posting to raise awareness for all the people subbed to r/modnews that aren't subbed to r/changelog.
If only that was possible through search..
Wow, what dickheads.
Ever since the last major search update, search doesn't work for Chinese words with less than three characters. Hope Reddit can fix that.
search seems worse in r/anime to me - previously I could search the name of a show and the most relevant results would generally be episode discussion threads - now I really have to scroll down to find one
I know this is super niche, but is there any chance of us getting numerical search? And search by range. Or less niche: search by flair class?
For example, r/boh5e uses flair to display the average score given to submissions. It'd be nice to be able to search and say "I want only things that scored >8.0. It also uses flair classes to determine roughly what category it's in. Would be nice to say "I want to search for things that are 'excellent'."
How do I tell when I received the rollout? I have noticed it has been easier to find stuff recently and didn't need to use google.
That's high praise. Thanks for the encouragement!
The easiest way is to go to reddit.com on desktop, log in, and click on the search bar at the top right. If you see an "include NSFW results" option right under the search bar (after you've clicked on it), then you're on new search.
Yup, I'm on it! Great to hear about all the new improvements, I thought it was just me until I saw this post lol.
Not for nothing, but we've heard this before. As the saying goes: "I'll believe it when I see it".
We hope you see it and like it!
Thanks for continuing to improve the reddit search. The utility of this feature of the site only grows as its effectiveness increases.
Looking forward to being able to use it more. Thank you!
Our pleasure ChingShih!
Can we get a dev blog post on this? I'm really interested to know what changes were made and how that stack used changed to reflect that.
There'll be a full tech blog coming on this, soon as we actually get through rolling it out :)
Are we going to assume that the major outage has nothing to do with the deployment of this update? :P
It actually doesn't, I promise you :)... we're only servicing 1% of requests and have been running at 100% of dark traffic for weeks now with no issues.
Wait, what major outage?
That was 3 weeks ago so I don't remember anymore :D
I would also like to throw my concerns into the ring about not being able to sort by link flair CSS. Using flair css to differentiate posts is extremely helpful in the case of r/NASCAR by assigning different types of threads (Race thread, AMAs, Discussion threads, etc). There is no flair text assigned to most of these posts as the CSS itself is all that's needed to keep the type of post differentiated properly.
In the case of Race threads or Discussion threads, or most other threads, being able to search by title is just fine as most will contain the exact text "Discussion thread:", "Race thread:", etc. However, in the case of AMAs, every title is different and there is currently no way to search for all AMAs within r/NASCAR. The former link no longer works, and now we have no way of keeping track of all of our AMA guests without manually writing down every link in the wiki and hoping we don't miss any.
I would really like to keep the ability to search by flair CSS.
Please?
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If I recall correctly that happened because by default reddit bypasses the l2cs library (which parses queries from lucene into cloudsearch, someone slowly) if the query doesn't contain any symbols. So if you actually did search on anything other than text (e.g.
subreddit:foo OR subreddit:bar) it'd work, butfoo OR barwouldn't.Will the current use of "over18:yes" still work?
According to u/artemois's comment here:
"nsfw" will still be supported, so "nsfw:yes" should work as intended.
UPDATE: Folks, based on everyone's feedback here we've enabled the ability to do subtext searches in flair text in the new stack. You'll no longer need to do exact matches as previously stated once we move to the new search stack. We'll be updating the post shortly.
When searching on a multireddit with the "limit my search to r/multireddit_name" checkbox checked I'm getting search results from subreddits that are not in the multireddit
Edit: this only happens if I'm logged in
u/bitofsalt has highlighted this amazing upcoming change in another thread. I'd like to pitch in a few ideas:
Search in the comments. Google supports searching through Reddit comments using the "site:reddit.com" search query. Having this included right on the website would be nice. Sorting by commenters' karma would be hopefully useful to see the better comments even if they don't get a lot of karma in that particular thread.
Integrate comment search functionality directly in the thread. This will help to search for particular words in the comment section (such as "source", "original", "this won't work, because", ...).
Search by the type of a submission. Mainly to be able to search only video or image links (jpg, gif, mp4, imgur/photobucket/flickr albums). I know this can be done by specifying the file extension and the site domain in the current search engine, but some of the links don't point to a URL that has a file extension included. This would also allow for searching all domains with pictures at once without having to list them manually.
Improve inter-subreddit duplicates detection. It is becoming common that people repost the same popular submissions to many different subreddits and then these end up on r/all or the frontpage. This means that while browsing these multireddits you can see the same post multiple times, which frustrates Reddit addicts. Some kind of a grouping would work well too, either within the search results (something like "related coverage" on Google News) or directly on the multireddits.
Show thumbnails of images and videos in the results. Some users might welcome having the search results shown as a picture gallery. In this way it is easier to sift through the results. A thumbnail of every linked website would be perfect.
Something like KarmaDecay or other kind of reverse image search based on a visual image descriptor (such as phash) directly on this site would be really awesome, instead of having to use Google reverse image search.
TLDR; Please, make it easier to view image/video based search results in large numbers (in a gallery mode). Improve duplicate detection and group the same submissions together.
Thank you!
Thanks for the feedback u/tamyahiNe2!
We already have comment search on the roadmap, completely agree that this will be great value to add. Searching by submission type is also a great idea that I'll add to the backlog.
We will also be redoing the whole search results page (as well as autocomplete). We'll look at thumbnails/previews in that redesign effort too.
For the duplicates issue, this is something we've been thinking about as well and have a whole feature that will address the core user experience here. Still need to close on how we really want to behave in a world where we de-dupe though but it's on our minds.
Reverse image search is something that's in our hackathon "roadmap"... basically a really cool feature we want to take a stab at but haven't quite prioritized in the official roadmap yet. Also looking at similar image searches in the same vein...
Thanks again for all the ideas!
Thank you for providing more info on each of the points!
Will I need to disable legacy search to see these new changes?
So are these changes to search going to be permanent? Because now the default search by "relevance" returns mostly posts with less than 50 upvotes, a lot of which have zero upvotes. That doesn't seem very "relevant" to me. The old search results were much better.
Comment deleted by user
See u/bitofsalt's comment here about cloudsearch no longer being usable:
It will still work via the API, but not through the regular reddit search interface.
So, NSFW have to be included in a seperated tick box? Whyvdid I only learn about this two weeks later? Did it become affective immediately or am I running Valve Time!
What happen to the directory of subreddits that would appear when you searched for something?
The handling of the "show not safe for work (NSFW) content in search results" preference interacts terribly with search links.
A search link with "include_over_18=on" will set the preference to "on" (including for unrelated future searches) until the user changes it.
A search link with "include_over_18=off" will set the preference to "off" (including for unrelated future searches) until the user changes it.
A search link without "include_over_18" at all will still set the preference to "off" (including for unrelated future searches) until the user changes it. This is so even if the search link query includes "nsfw:yes".
There needs to be a way for us to create search links that don't alter the user's preference one way or the other. To do otherwise defeats the point of having it as a user preference. I suggest that at least search links without "include_over_18" at all should not alter the user's preference.
Paging u/bitofsalt
EDIT: I would suggest that even altering the preference when "include_over_18=on" is included in the link will have bad consequences. Most moderators will create search links by performing a search and then copying the URL. All it takes is a moderator with "show NSFW content in search results" in their personal preferences to copy/paste a search that will turn on the preference in the background. The search itself might even be for something totally innocuous.
If I may be so bold, here is how it should work:
1. The search UI (i.e., stuff in the right sidebar) should of course pull the initial checkbox value from the user's prefs.
2A. If the checkbox is altered, the pref should be changed in a way that can't affect other users by copy/paste of the link, such as using a cookie (obviously NOT the oauth cookie, but some more limited cookie that is only good for changing the NSFW search preference of user X). This is a lot of work, but I think that's a consequence of wanting a GET query to change a user preference safely.
2B. An alternative to 2A would be to make the checkbox one-time: keep include_over_18=on/off but don't alter the user preference based on it, just the NSFW checkbox on the one-time search result page. The user will need to use the preference page to change their default.
3. Since no search link can edit the preference, anyone wanting an unconditionally nsfw search link needs "nsfw:yes" in the query. (This is already allowed now, and I assume that ordinary admin/mod policing is enough to prevent abuse of "nsfw:yes" search links outside of NSFW subreddits and/or posts.)
Thanks for the detailed feedback and suggestions! We're looking at cleaning up the NSFW handling and aren't very happy with how it's working currently either. Will add this info to that epic for consideration as we re-spec this space.
Ah, shit this explains ... some things. /outoftheloop... >_<
How do we search flair class now? It's a fundamental part of filtering in lots of places.