Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stated that, over this yr, Reddit plans to launch an upgraded search expertise that’ll assist customers navigate the social community, but additionally reply “subjective, arduous, [and] fascinating questions.”
The firm plans to realize this by integrating Reddit Answers, its characteristic that permits guests to ask questions and obtain curated summaries of related responses and threads from throughout its platform, into Reddit’s present search.
“[In Reddit] conversations, for 20 years, our customers have left this positively huge corpus of data, so we’re beginning to unlock that with Answers,” Huffman stated throughout Reddit’s This fall 2024 earnings name on Wednesday. “We’ll proceed to iterate on this product.”
Reddit’s CFO, Drew Vollero, added in the course of the name that Reddit is recruiting engineers to construct a “small search group” targeted on these capabilities.
Reddit is more and more embracing AI because it seeks to develop. Last yr, the platform introduced AI-powered translation to dozens of latest territories, with extra deliberate for this yr, and rolled out AI-powered insights for manufacturers. Reddit additionally started testing AI-powered search outcomes pages, which summarize and suggest content material throughout totally different Reddit communities.
Investors had been disenchanted in Reddit’s fiscal This fall metrics, which had been impacted partially by adjustments to Google’s search algorithm. Daily lively distinctive customers on Reddit had been up 39% year-over-year to 101.7 million customers, lacking traders’ estimates of 103.1 million uniques.
Huffman hinted at making Reddit search part of the platform onboarding course of to drive progress, retention, and finally income.
“I feel serving to the person be capable to search straight on Reddit, refine their queries on Reddit, finally come on to Reddit for these varieties of queries, and even integrating search into one thing like onboarding over time — I feel [these are] actually fascinating issues,” he stated. “It’s wonderful for us to select up on that sign […] and naturally, that sign [has] unbelievable monetization potential.”
