Reddit Unveils AI-Enhanced Search Features

# Search # Reddit # earnings # q4 2024

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman recently announced that the platform is set to roll out an enhanced search feature in 2025. This upgrade aims to make it easier for users to navigate the site and tackle those tricky, subjective, and intriguing questions that often pop up. To make this happen, Reddit is weaving in a tool called Reddit Answers. This nifty feature lets folks pose questions and get a neat summary of the best answers and discussions from all over Reddit. It's like having a personal guide through the vast sea of Reddit conversations. During Reddit's Q4 2024 earnings call, Huffman shared his excitement about tapping into the wealth of info users have been dropping on the site for the past two decades. "We're just starting to unlock that with Answers," he said, hinting that they'll keep tweaking and improving this feature. CFO Drew Vollero chimed in, mentioning that Reddit is on the hunt for engineers to form a dedicated "small search team" to bring these ideas to life. Reddit's been all about AI lately, trying to expand its reach. Last year, they introduced AI-powered translations to a bunch of new places, with more on the way this year. They also started testing AI-driven search results that pull together and suggest content from various Reddit communities. Unfortunately, investors weren't thrilled with Reddit's Q4 financials, partly because of some tweaks Google made to its search algorithm. Even though daily active unique users jumped 39% to 101.7 million, it didn't quite hit the mark set by investors, who were hoping for 103.1 million. Huffman also dropped a hint about weaving search into the platform's onboarding process to boost growth, keep users coming back, and, of course, rake in more cash. "Helping users search directly on Reddit, refine their queries, and eventually come straight to Reddit for those queries—even integrating search into onboarding over time—I think these are really interesting moves," he said. "It's amazing for us to pick up on that signal... and of course, that signal has incredible monetization potential."

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