Improving the Search Performance and Functionality

The search feature is often overlooked in terms of how important and impactful it is to the user experience. Here are a few things that could significantly help: Performance Search performance tends to degrade when users search for phrases longer than one or two words. The more words entered, the longer it takes to return results. Please consider optimizing this. Tip: Excluding common stop words like "the," "a," "or," and "and" can speed up performance in many cases. Accuracy Search accuracy suffers when longer phrases are used, often returning unrelated results. Implementing the Levenshtein distance approach to assess similarity and phrase weighting could help return more relevant results for longer queries. Search Within Comments We should be able to search within comments as well. Often when people Google something followed by "Reddit," it's a comment that provides the most relevant and helpful information. Community-Specific Search Having a dedicated search bar per community would greatly improve the user experience by allowing people to find relevant content within the specific subreddit they’re browsing. Search Comments Inside Posts This would be especially helpful for popular posts with hundreds of comments. Users could more easily find something they previously saw but didn’t save or finish reading. Strict Search Allowing the use of quotation marks for exact phrase matches would be a valuable feature for those looking for precise information. There are many more search-related features and optimizations that could be explored, but I trust the dev team is aware of most. This is just a friendly reminder to prioritize improving search in future.