Only Eight Reddit Search Operators Are Officially Documented

What are the Reddit search operators?

The complete list of Reddit search operators that Reddit itself documents runs to eight fields: author, flair, self, selftext, site, subreddit, title and url. Reddit publishes them in one help centre article, "Available search features", and calls them manual filtering words rather than operators. Type them into the search bar next to your terms, with no space between the field name and the value.

Operator	What it matches	Reddit's own example
author	The user who submitted the post	author:reddit
flair	The text of the link flair on the post	flair:cats
self	Text posts only, set to true or false	self:true
selftext	The body of the post	selftext:cats
site	The domain of the submitted URL	site:example.com
subreddit	The submission's subreddit	subreddit:cats
title	The submission title	title:cats
url	The submission's URL	url:cats

Reddit's article is blunt about the spacing rule and shows both sides of it: author:cats works, author: cats does not. Fields stack, so cats subreddit:pics site:imgur.com is a valid query. A value with a space in it has to be quoted, as in title:"kitten gif", and Reddit accepts single or double quotes.

Which Reddit search operators only appear in community posts?

Operators such as timestamp, nsfw, ups, is_self, over18 and distinguished circulate widely in r/help threads, in old wiki pages and in third party guides, and Reddit documents none of them. They are leftovers from cloudsearch, the query backend Reddit ran behind a syntax=cloudsearch parameter years ago. Reddit's current help centre never names them, and neither does its API reference.

That absence is checkable rather than a matter of opinion. The Search section of Reddit's help centre holds six articles, and only "Available search features" lists field operators at all. The API reference at reddit.com/dev/api documents GET [/r/subreddit]/search with the parameters q, sort, t, type, restrict_sr, limit, count, category, include_facets, before, after, show and sr_detail. There is no syntax parameter in that list, and the strings "cloudsearch" and "timestamp" do not appear anywhere on the page.

So the honest split looks like this.

Operator	Documented by Reddit	Where it comes from
author, flair, self, selftext, site, subreddit, title, url	Yes, in the help centre	Reddit's "Available search features" article
AND, OR, NOT, ( )	Yes, in the help centre	Same article, boolean section
timestamp, nsfw, ups, is_self, over18, distinguished	No	Cloudsearch era syntax, kept alive in community posts
-term as a negation prefix	No	Borrowed from Google, repeated in Reddit guides

One caveat on testing. Reddit now serves a sign up wall to logged out visitors at reddit.com/search, and the JSON endpoint returns 403 to unauthenticated clients, so the undocumented operators cannot be exercised from outside an account. What can be established from the outside is which side of the documentation line each one sits on, and an operator Reddit does not document is an operator Reddit can retire without telling you.

How do AND, OR and NOT work on Reddit?

Reddit supports AND, OR and NOT as boolean operators, and its help centre states that they are case sensitive. Lowercase and is treated as a search word, not as logic. Parentheses group parts of a query, and Reddit uses its own worked example to show why you need them: hedgehog NOT sonic OR shadow returns very different results from hedgehog NOT (sonic OR shadow).

That is the whole boolean grammar. There is no proximity operator, no wildcard, no field range syntax and no minimum engagement filter. If you have come from the operator set on X, the gap is wide: X ships engagement thresholds, geo filters and a conversation filter that have no Reddit equivalent.

Why does the same query behave differently in posts and comments?

Reddit applies different matching rules to the three result types, and it says so in the same article. For posts, "results only need to include some of your search words, unless you use the special syntax above to force an exact match". For comments and users, results "must currently include all of your search words". The same three word query is therefore an OR-ish query over posts and an AND query over comments, which is enough to make a term look dead in one tab and busy in the other.

The practical move is to quote the phrase when you want an exact match in post search, and to treat comment search as already strict. Comments are also where most buying signal lives on Reddit, since the question gets asked in a post and the recommendations arrive underneath it.

Posts match loosely, comments match strictly

Post search

• Only some search words need to match
• Quote a phrase to force an exact match
• Behaves like an OR across your terms

Comment and user search

• All search words must be present
• Already strict by default
• Behaves like an AND across your terms

What limits does Reddit put on a search query?

Reddit's API reference caps the q parameter at 512 characters and caps limit at 100 results per request, with a default of 25. The sort parameter accepts relevance, hot, top, new and comments. The t parameter accepts hour, day, week, month, year and all. The type parameter takes a comma delimited list of sr, link and user, and category is capped at five characters.

Parameter	Documented value
q	A string no longer than 512 characters
limit	Default 25, maximum 100
sort	relevance, hot, top, new, comments
t	hour, day, week, month, year, all
type	Comma delimited list of sr, link, user
restrict_sr	Boolean, scopes the search to one subreddit

The 512 character ceiling is the one that bites. A monitoring query that names a product, three competitors and six negative keywords crosses it quickly, and the answer is several narrow queries rather than one wide one. Reddit's own interface exposes the same sorts through the UI: relevance, hot, top, new and comment count, with a time filter covering all time, past year, month, week, 24 hours and hour. Comment results sort by relevance, top and new only.

How do you turn operators into a monitoring query?

Start with subreddit, because it removes the most noise per character spent. The same phrase means different things in r/sysadmin and r/smallbusiness, and scoping first leaves the rest of the query less work to do. Finding the right communities is its own job, and a subreddit finder returns a candidate list faster than browsing does.

Then add the intent language rather than the product language. People asking for a recommendation write "any alternative to", "worth switching from", "what do you use for". Those phrases quoted and scoped to a handful of subreddits return a shorter list than a brand name ever will, which is the point. The full workflow, including how often to rebuild the community list, sits in the longer guide to searching Reddit properly.

The ceiling on all of this is that search answers a question you ask, and says nothing when something new appears. Rerunning eight queries by hand every morning is how most people arrive at ongoing brand monitoring instead.

Frequently asked questions

Does Reddit support wildcards in search?

No. Reddit's help centre documents eight field operators, three boolean operators and parentheses, and a wildcard character is not among them. Searching market* matches the literal string rather than expanding to marketing and marketer. Write the variants out and join them with OR.

Can I search Reddit by date range?

Not with an operator. Reddit's documented time control is the t parameter, which accepts hour, day, week, month, year and all, so the finest grain you can ask for is the last hour and the only ranges are ones that end today. The timestamp operator that circulates in community posts belongs to the retired cloudsearch syntax and appears nowhere in Reddit's help centre or API reference.

Is flair: the same as clicking a flair tag?

Close, and Reddit documents both. flair:cats matches the text of the link flair on a post, while tapping a flair tag in the mobile apps takes you to the posts carrying that flair. Flair text is set per community, so a flair query only makes sense once you have scoped to a subreddit that uses it.

Why does author: return nothing for a user I can see posting?

Removed and deleted content leaves the search index even though the thread still renders, so an author query comes back thin for an account whose posts have been pulled by moderators. Author search also covers submissions rather than comments by default, so a redditor who only ever comments looks silent under author:.

Do these operators work through the Reddit API?

The field operators go in the q parameter of GET [/r/subreddit]/search, so the same eight strings apply. What changes is the envelope: q is capped at 512 characters, limit tops out at 100, and access is rate limited per client. Those ceilings are set out in the note on Reddit API rate limits.

Does Google find Reddit threads that Reddit's own search misses?

Yes, because the two indexes are built differently and Google has been crawling those URLs for years. A site:reddit.com query on Google is the right second pass when a Reddit-side query comes back empty. Note the collision: site: on Google means the domain of the page you are searching, while site: on Reddit means the domain a link post points at.

Can I use a minus sign to exclude a word on Reddit?

The minus sign is not part of Reddit's documented syntax. It gets borrowed from Google and repeated across community guides, but Reddit's help centre lists only AND, OR, NOT and parentheses as boolean tools. Use NOT instead of -term if you want a result Reddit's own documentation actually backs.

Why does Reddit call these words filtering words instead of operators?

Reddit's help centre article names the eight fields manual filtering words, not operators, even though the community calls them operators everywhere else. The label matches how the article treats them: type them next to your terms with no space before the value, the same way you'd add any other search word.

What was cloudsearch and why does it still show up in Reddit search guides?

Cloudsearch was the search backend Reddit ran years ago behind a syntax=cloudsearch parameter, and it supported extra fields such as timestamp, nsfw and ups. Reddit's current help centre and API reference never mention it, and the strings "cloudsearch" and "timestamp" appear nowhere on the API reference page. Those fields still circulate in old wiki pages and third party guides because nobody pulled them once the backend changed.

Should Reddit search results sort by relevance or by new?

It depends on the result type more than personal preference. Reddit's post search offers relevance, hot, top, new and comment count as sort options, plus a time filter, while comment results sort only by relevance, top and new. For a fast moving thread, new surfaces the latest replies, but relevance is a better default for scanning a wide query since posts already match loosely.