[phdelightful]

I wonder to what extent this is an early step toward walling off Reddit's content from third-party search engines. They probably recognize that without a functional search they'd take a big hit in such a scenario, but with search under their own control they can better influence how people end up seeing various content.

[shostack]

That and/or building a better relevancy engine for search-based ads. It isn't the worst idea because they don't need to do horribly privacy invasive things to provide query based ads. But obviously they will because there are even better relevancy scores to be had with the other signals in a given user's account.

[theNJR]

This was my first reaction too.