Popular forum and social media platform Reddit announced Reddit Answers late last year. In case you missed it, it’s the AI-powered search tool on the platform that capitalises on the fact that many people put the platform’s name at the end of their internet searches. CEO Steve Huffman said during its earnings call that the platform will lean harder into the feature, going as far as saying that it’s one of the company’s top priorities.
Huffman says “we’re concentrating our resources on areas that will drive results for our most pressing needs, improving the core product, making Reddit a go-to search engine, and expanding internationally”. He adds that the company focus is on unifying the standard search on the platform with Reddit Answers “into a single search experience”. That unified search too will then be brought “front and centre in the app”.
The statement itself sounds like it could go two ways. One is that Reddit has ambitions of making a search engine for the internet in general to rival Google. But perhaps the more likely scenario is that it is strengthening the existing one on its own platform. That, and hoping people to straight to the platform to start their search, rather than via the usual search engine channels.
In a similar vein, the move, in whichever direction, is to deal with search engine AI summaries eating into its own traffic. Worth nothing also though is that Google and Reddit signed a deal last year allowing the former to use content from the latter to train its own AI.
(Source: Reddit [PDF] via The Verge)
