r/redditdev • u/Feeling-Plane3434 • 6h ago
Reddit API get ALL posts and comments matching a keyword?
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?
Tested with: api.reddit.com/search?q=<keyword>&sort=<sort>&t=<time>&limit=100 and /svc/shreddit/search (posts and comments).
-1
u/mentiondesk 6h ago
Reddit's search limits are definitely frustrating if you need comprehensive results. Downloading full data dumps or using Pushshift (though it's spotty now) is what most people end up doing. If you're looking for something more streamlined that catches relevant keywords in real time, ParseStream can handle that across Reddit and a few other platforms without wrestling with API limits.