It's possible to search for posts and comments in a specific subreddit in Reddit using Google. To do this, simply add site:reddit.com/r/name-of-the-subreddit to your query. For example, if you search for:
nasa site:reddit.com/r/iamaGoogle will only show results that contain the term "nasa" from the /r/iama subreddit.
This technique may also work in other search engines.
How to Search Comments in a Subreddit
Using the method above, we can search comments by subreddit too, because the comments are part of the threads, but it doesn't work perfectly.
That's because Google only indexes the webpage of the thread itself. It doesn't index every comment on the thread. In other The comments that appear prominently, the upvoted comments and their first replies, these will be indexed by Google and you'll be able to search for them and find them. However, downvoted comments and comments buried deep into the replies do not appear on the thread page so Google doesn't index them.
In threads with few comments, that's not a problem as every comment is likely to be indexed, but threads with hundreds of comments probably won't be indexed entirely.
You may noticed that each comment on Reddit has its own URL. Ideally, you would be able to use Google's asterisk operator to do something like this:
nasa https://www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/*/comment/However, this doesn't work, because the comment pages aren't indexed, only the thread pages are.
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