Reddit has long been a popular destination for interesting articles, funny memes, and insightful, polite debate with people who have the same opinions as you. The site is so popular, in fact, many of us simply add “Reddit” to the end of our Google searches, conditioned to believe that we have a better chance of finding an answer on the site versus the rest of the internet.
That doesn’t really work if you use another major search engine like Bing: As it happens, Reddit limited the search engines you could find Reddit results from largely to Google. But since Google is by and far the most popular search engine on the internet, many of us have success with these “Reddit” addendums. Reddit is well aware of this trend, and doesn’t want you to do it anymore—at least, the company doesn’t want you bothering with a search engine like Google in the first place.
The company is rolling out a new search tool called Reddit Answers, which uses AI (it is 2024, after all) to deliver detailed results to user queries. It isn’t a simple search feature though, meaning you don’t type your query, hit return, then sift through a sea of subreddit posts to find what you’re looking for. Instead, when you search something, Reddit Answers generates a full summary to answer your question, complete with headings and bullet points—all based on Reddit content, of course. Each point comes with a hyperlink to the Reddit post the answer is pulling from. When you click the link, it opens up the post in a sidebar, so you don’t have to leave the summary to fact check it.
Reddit first disclosed it was working on an AI summary feature of its own back in August, so this isn’t too surprisingly. The feature itself is quite reminiscent of other AI summarizers, including Google’s own AI Overviews, which scrapes the internet to generate a summarized answer to your query. (Those in the know are aware of how rocky that initial rollout was.)
