
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stated that, over this 12 months, Reddit plans to launch an upgraded search expertise that’ll assist customers navigate the social community, but additionally reply “subjective, laborious, [and] fascinating questions.”
The corporate plans to attain this by integrating Reddit Answers, its characteristic that enables guests to ask questions and obtain curated summaries of related responses and threads from throughout its platform, into Reddit’s current search.
“[In Reddit] conversations, for 20 years, our customers have left this positively large corpus of data, so we’re beginning to unlock that with Solutions,” Huffman stated throughout Reddit’s This autumn 2024 earnings name on Wednesday. “We’ll proceed to iterate on this product.”
Reddit’s CFO, Drew Vollero, added through the name that Reddit is recruiting engineers to construct a “small search crew” centered on these capabilities.
Reddit is more and more embracing AI because it seeks to develop. Final 12 months, the platform brought AI-powered translation to dozens of recent territories, with extra deliberate for this 12 months, and rolled out AI-powered insights for brands. Reddit additionally began testing AI-powered search results pages, which summarize and suggest content material throughout completely different Reddit communities.
Buyers had been disenchanted in Reddit’s fiscal This autumn metrics, which had been impacted in part by changes to Google’s search algorithm. Every day lively distinctive customers on Reddit had been up 39% year-over-year to 101.7 million customers, lacking buyers’ estimates of 103.1 million.
Huffman hinted at making Reddit search part of the platform onboarding course of to drive development, retention, and in the end income.
“I feel serving to the person be capable of search instantly on Reddit, refine their queries on Reddit, ultimately come on to Reddit for these forms of queries, and even integrating search into one thing like onboarding over time — I feel [these are] actually fascinating issues,” he stated. “It’s superb for us to select up on that sign […] and naturally, that sign is unbelievable monetization potential.”