Microsoft and Reddit Partner To Make Search Better

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Reddit is a unique asset on the Internet, a community filled with millions of users and billions of page views but if you have ever used the site, you will know that searching for content is nearly impossible. With sub-reddit naming not always following the typical SEO friendly conventions and questions being buried in the 2.3 million daily comments, finding an answer to your question can be nearly impossible.

The Microsoft and Reddit are announcing a partnership that they say has been two years in the making and will make it significantly easier to use Bing to search content on Reddit. In addition to improved search, Microsoft is also building services for Power BI to make it easier for brands to view their impact on the community.

The new Bing Intelligent Search feature will make it easer to search nested content inside of AMAs and sub-Reddits and other places on the site but sadly, you will still have to go to Bing.com to use the features. The reason I say ‘sadly’, is because the search on Reddit.com, based on the information give to me today, is not based on Bing’s new services and will still be as bad as it is today.

In addition to the search features, there is a more important update for marketers that will allow them to use Power BI to monitor the impact of advertising across the site. Using pre-built templates, Power BI is now becoming a key tool for measuring and monitoring marketing activities across that massive social-network.

These announcements for Microsoft today show an interesting new direction for targeting specific scenarios and websites to improve the end-user experience. Reddit is notoriously known for having awful discoverability, if Bing can play its cards right, it may be able to drive more users to search using its platform as long as they can effectively communicate that Bing can provide better results than Google for the site.