Reddit will soon launch a new and upgraded search tool in 2025, aiming to improve the user experience and better explore the massive data accumulated by the platform over the past 20 years. The tool will integrate AI-powered Reddit Answers features to provide a more refined answer summary and plan to be combined with the user entry process to increase user growth and platform revenue. This move reflects Reddit's strategic direction of actively embracing artificial intelligence technology and committed to solving user search problems. The development team for the new search tool is being formed, which heralds Reddit's continued investment in search capabilities and technological innovation.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced at a recent earnings conference that the social network plans to launch a new upgraded search tool in 2025, aiming to help users browse platform content more easily while answering some "subjective, complex and interesting" The problem of ".
This new tool will integrate Reddit Answers capabilities where users can ask questions and get refined summary of related responses and topics.
Huffman said Reddit users have left a lot of discussion information over the past 20 years, and that is exactly the potential value Reddit Answers wants to unlock. “We started to use this information,” he said during the earnings call, “we are constantly iterating and improving this product.”
In addition, Reddit Chief Financial Officer Drew Vollero mentioned in the meeting that the company is recruiting engineers to form a small search team to focus on the development of this new feature. Reddit has been actively embracing artificial intelligence technology to drive the growth of the platform. Last year, Reddit launched AI-powered translation capabilities for several new regions and plans to launch more related services this year. In addition, Reddit has begun testing AI-driven search results pages that can summarize and recommend content from different communities.
However, Reddit's financial performance in the fourth quarter of 2024 disappointed investors, partly because changes in Google's search algorithm affected traffic. Although Reddit's daily active users increased by 39% year-on-year to 101.7 million, it was still lower than investor expectations of 103.1 million.
Huffman also hinted that search functions may be integrated into the platform's user engagement process in the future to drive user growth, improve retention and ultimately increase revenue. He believes that "helping users directly search, optimize queries on Reddit, and combining search with the inbound process are all very interesting directions." Huffman said that understanding the signals of users' needs has huge monetization potential.
Key points:
Reddit plans to launch a new search tool in 2025, integrating AI-powered Reddit Answers capabilities.
The company is hiring engineers to form a small team focused on search capabilities.
Despite significant user growth, Reddit's financial performance failed to meet investor expectations.
In short, Reddit's new search tool plan represents its continued investment in AI technology and user experience. Although there are financial challenges, its strategic direction is clear and future development is worth looking forward to. The successful implementation of the new search function will have a positive impact on Reddit's platform activity and commercialization.