Having decided last summer to discontinue its search deal with Google, Twitter has been paying more attention to its own search capabilities. In May, the micro-blogging outfit added spelling corrections and related queries alongside its search results. And just over the weekend, the company introduced two more search features to make querying its real-time torrent of tweets more effective.
The biggest change is a Google-like autocomplete function, which should be well-known to anyone who has used Google or Bing. It attempts to predict completed search terms as the user types, a convenience that can make searching much quicker.
Twitter’s autocompletion shows suggested terms or phrases in a dropdown menu, along with Twitter account names that match. Results are separated into two sections: words from tweets and user IDs. It does make it much easier to find the tweets (or the person) you are looking for.
“These updates make it even easier to instantly get closer to the things you care about,” said Twitter engineer Frost Li in a blog post.
Twitter’s improvements are search autocomplete and “People you follow” search results. “We are constantly working to make Twitter search the simplest way to discover what is happening in real time,” said Li.
Apart from numerous other improvements, with the addition of search autocomplete, you will see the most common terms for your query as you enter it, just like when you search on Google. Also, if you spell something wrong, Twitter will now automatically show results for the right spelling.
“Viewing tweets about a topic from just the people you follow is a great way to find useful information and join the conversation,” Li said.
On the other hand, “When you search for a name like ‘Jeremy Lin,’ you will see results mentioning that person’s real name and their Twitter account username,” Twitter wrote.
Moreover, being able to view all or top tweets for a given search, you can now narrow-down the results so that you only see tweets from people you follow. Finally, the update will help you find the official Twitter account for your favorite celebrity more easily, thanks to the addition of results with real names and usernames.
All the updates have been applicable to Twitter.com, while Twitter for iPhone and Android received search autocomplete, spelling corrections, and related search suggestions.
Most importantly, one of Twitter’s engineers yesterday suggested that big changes would be coming to the social network’s search function, though the update was not as major as some had speculated. “Search & discovery in @twitter set to change forever after tmrw,” tweeted Pankaj Gupta, engineering manager who heads up the personalization and recommender systems group at Twitter. “Team — congrats and enjoy the enormity of ur impact few understand today!”
According to Gupta’s tweet, some had anticipated that the update would allow users to run a query of all Twitter history. No such luck.
Twitter boasts more than 140 million active users who post more than one billion tweets every three days, with the largest number being in the US.