Reddit is a very popular website built around the idea of submitting links and images and with a voting mechanism which determines visibility. The website is divided into millions of groups known as subreddits and people with similar interests come together in the subreddits of their choice.
But Reddit is far from perfect and users face many different problems on the platform, also they recently launched a complete redesign of their website which was not well received and has been criticised by the users a lot. There are have also many instances when it has been reported by users the Reddit search is not working. This happens a lot more when people are searching for stuff which is marked NSFW(not safe for work). Reddit also displays the following message – ‘sorry, there were no post results for “”’.
Why is Reddit search not working?
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There are various reasons which can cause the Reddit search to not work, many of these have been encountered and reported by users –
- NSFW filters enabled – There are specific NSFW filters options for each user in their account settings and search results are displayed by adhering to those filters. Also by default, those filters are turned on, so NSFW content is censored from the search results and you are also notified about the existence of those filters by Reddit.
- Adblockers enabled – We also know that adblockers are famous for breaking down websites and spoiling the user experience and Reddit is no exception and many users affix adblockers as the reason for their Reddit search not working.
- Reddit experiencing downtime – There are many times that the Reddit servers go down or some other service in their backend is misbehaving and this can cause Reddit to experience downtime or some of their features like search might not work for some time.
- Browser cache not cleared – If the cache or temporary data stored in your browser hasn’t been cleared in a long time then, it can cause problems with some websites like Reddit.
How to fix Reddit search not working?
Here are the various solutions you can try to get the search function in your Reddit account working properly –
1. Disable adblockers
Most users who faced this problem in Reddit have blamed their ad blocker extensions for it. So if you are using any ad blocking extensions, then right-click on its icon at the top right side and then click on Remove.
Now try searching again and you will see that the Reddit search works perfectly fine or else move on to the next step.
2. Disable Reddit filters
Whenever someone opens a Reddit account, by default there are a few filters which are put in place which censor NSFW content from the search results. You can disable them by going into your account settings –
- First, open your account settings from the dropdown menu under your username.
- Then click on the ‘Feed Settings’ option.
- Enable the ‘Adult content’ option and disable the ‘Safe browsing mode’ option by sliding them.
- The settings will be automatically saved and then you can search on Reddit and get the results for whatever you were searching for.
3. Check if Reddit is down
There have been many instances when Reddit has experienced downtime and some of their services have been malfunctioning. So it would be better to check if other users are also facing the same problem by visiting the Reddit status page or the down detector website or @redditstatus on twitter. If Reddit is experiencing problems then you have no option apart from waiting for them to fix it.
4. Use Google search dorks
If none of the above solutions worked for you, then you can just use the greatest search engine ever made which is – Google. If you are looking for subreddits related to a certain topic then just search that name+ Reddit and you will get the results.
If you want to search in a specific subreddit, then type the “search term” + site:reddit.com/r/{subredditname}, and you will get search results from that subreddit only. You can also put double quotes around your query in order to get specific results.
There are also various websites made by independent programmers intended for a better search experience on Reddit. You can use websites like redditsearch.io, which has many different filters and parameters, which can help you really narrow down your search.
