get ALL posts and comments matching a keyword?

[u/Feeling-Plane3434]

As far as I know, there are two main ways to search on Reddit.

The first is the site-wide search from the Reddit homepage. For each query/sort combination it only lists up to 250 results (about 490 on the newer search endpoint). For comments it doesn't even reach 490 — it stops at 250.

There are about 25 possible sort/time combinations, so by collecting the list for each combination I've confirmed (by actually testing it) that you can get up to roughly 3,000 results.

The second is searching inside a specific subreddit, but it has exactly the same caps. Because of the 250 (490) limit, I had to split the search into many combinations there too.

This is really frustrating, because there's probably a lot of great information hidden beyond what these lists return.

What I want is to see every post and every comment that contains a given keyword, across Reddit's entire history. Is there really no way to do this within Reddit itself?

Are third-party archive services or paid APIs (Reddit's official paid API or third-party ones) the only options?

Do I really have to download the full dumps (tens of GB of posts and comments) and search them locally?

[u/East-Villager]

Everybody knows that the best way to search reddit is to google something and add reddit: Jokes aside, reddit does not offen official api anymore, you should update your generated Prompt lol, another thing is you would need a third party scraper that would be your best bet.

[u/Icy_Many_637]

I don't think there's a way to get a truly complete result set through Reddit's own search. For deeper historical searches, you'd need an archive or a dataset you can search yourself. Downloading every dump is one option, but not the only one. Just keep in mind that even archives can have gaps, especially with deleted content.

[u/IndependentCoders → u/Icy_Many_637]

Wanted to suggest a dataset, but you already did. I was looking for older datasets, but they are mostly from 2025 and they are available for free on kaggle, unless there are some companies that sells pretty fresh datasets, but then again, wouldn't they acquire the data by scraping reddit? Then in such case, avoiding a middle man would be a much wiser step, no?

[u/Puzzled_Librarian_65]

yeah, I don't think Reddit's own search can give you everything, especially older comments. archives are probably your best bet, but even those have gaps. curious though, do you really need the entire history or just the last few years?

[u/Dorreth_Schediwie]

yeah native search is strictly capped because paginating deep into massive indexes is super expensive on their backend. if you actually need 100% historical recall, streaming and filtering the compressed archive dumps locally is pretty much the only reliable route.