Late last year, Reddit introduced Reddit Answers, an artificial intelligence-based search tool. Now the company plans to make this feature even more prominent by adding it to the main search across the Reddit site, CEO Steve Huffman said during the first quarter earnings call.
“We are now working to integrate it into Reddit’s main search to make it even easier to get from question to answer on Reddit,” Huffman said. “Integration into Reddit search means that we want to have one search box. This will be the main search box, and you’ll put your query in there and get maybe your [Reddit] Answers, an answer or, you know, a more traditional Reddit answer, depending on what you’re looking for.”
Until now, Reddit Answers, which is still labeled as “beta,” existed in its own section of the service. This feature summarizes conversations from all over Reddit in response to queries that users could find by adding “Reddit” to a Google search query. According to Huffman, Reddit Answers, which recently became available to all U.S. Reddit editors as well as several international markets, already has 1 million weekly users. This is only a small fraction of Reddit’s 401 million weekly users, but the addition of this service to Reddit’s main search bar should give it a boost.
According to Huffman, this change is part of a broader strategy aimed at improving Reddit’s search experience. According to him, Reddit Answers can help make the service more accessible to new users and target people who come to the site through search engines. This change may also be somewhat controversial – Reddit users are not very fond of big changes on the service – although Huffman admitted that users do not always want to receive an AI-generated summary in response to every query.
“Sometimes people want generalized, annotated, sterile answers from artificial intelligence, and we even create those answers ourselves on Reddit Answers,” Huffman said. “But sometimes they need subjective, authentic, messy, diverse viewpoints, which Reddit provides.”
