I noted “The Right Way to Search Posts on Reddit.” I find it interesting that the Reddit content is not comprehensively indexed by Google. One does stumble across this type of results list in the Google if one knows how to use Google’s less than obvious search syntax. Where’s bad stuff on Reddit? Google will reveal some links of interest to law enforcement professionals. For example:
Bing does a little better with certain Reddit content. To be fair, neither service is doing a bang up job indexing social media content but lists a fraction of the Google index pointers. For example:
So how does one search Reddit.com the “right way.” I noted this paragraph:
As of 2015, Reddit had accumulated over 190 million posts across 850,000 different subreddits (or communities), plus an additional 1.7 billion comments across all of those posts. That’s an incredible amount of content, and all of it can still be accessed on Reddit.
I would point out that the “all” is not accurate. There is a body of content deleted by moderators, including some of Reddit.com’s top dogs, which has been removed from the site.
Reddit offers some search syntax to help the researcher locate what is indexed by Reddit.com’s search system. The write up pointed to these strings:
- title:[text] searches only post titles.
- author:[username] searches only posts by the given username.
- selftext:[text] searches only the body of posts that were made as self-posts.
- subreddit:[name] searches only posts that were submitted to the given subreddit community.
- url:[text] searches only the URL of non-self-post posts.
- site:[text] searches only the domain name of non-self-post posts.
- nsfw:yes or nsfw:no to filter results based on whether they were marked as NSFW or not.
- self:yes or self:no to filter results based on whether they were self-posts or not.
The article contains a handful of other search commands; for example, Boolean and and or. How does one NOT out certain words. Use the minus sign. The word not is apparently minus sign appropriate for the discerning Reddit.com searcher.
Stephen E Arnold, February 23, 2017