How do you search for content across all of Reddit?

Reddit's global search function is the primary tool for finding posts, comments, communities, and users across the entire platform. On the desktop website, the search bar is prominently located at the top of every page. Typing a query and pressing Enter or clicking the magnifying glass icon submits a search that, by default, runs across all of Reddit rather than just the community you happen to be visiting. The results page organizes findings into tabs: Posts, Comments, Communities, and People. The Posts tab is where most users spend their time, showing matching posts from every public subreddit. Switching to Communities surfaces subreddits whose names or descriptions match your query, while People finds usernames that match. On the mobile app, the search bar is accessible from the magnifying glass icon in the navigation bar. The same tab structure appears on mobile, allowing you to filter results by content type. By default, searches on both platforms return results from all of Reddit unless you have navigated into a specific community and used the community-level search, which restricts results automatically. One important nuance is that Reddit's built-in search engine has historically been considered less powerful than Google for finding specific Reddit content. Many experienced users supplement Reddit's native search by using Google with the query structure "site:reddit.com [your search terms]", which often surfaces more relevant and older results that Reddit's own index might not surface prominently. For very specific or older discussions, Google's site-specific indexing tends to be more comprehensive. Reddit introduced Reddit Answers as an AI-assisted search feature that synthesizes information from Reddit discussions into direct answers with linked sources, which some users find useful for quick fact-finding. Standard search, however, remains the baseline tool and is most effective when combined with sort filters (setting results to Top and a specific time window) and the community-specific search covered in the next question.