Los Angeles — Long since, Twitter has functioned as an standalone and incredibly useful Twitter Search site for real-time results, in addition to allowing people to search from within Twitter.com itself. Now, the popular micro-blogging outfit Twitter has made its search process easier, and richer, both from within the short-messaging site, as well as on its revamped, separate search site.
Earlier, Twitter Search was located at http://search.twitter.com. Now, in a move that marks the change making #NewTwitter mandatory for everyone, it appears as though Twitter has terminated its old website. If you click through to that URL, it will redirect you to http://twitter.com/#!/search-home, as tweeted by Twitter on Tuesday.
The modifications, which came into effect this week, exhibits the network’s increased search traffic, with a recent record set last month: Peaks of “over 30,000 queries per second for two days in a row!” noted the Twitter’s search team (via tweet, of course).
With the newly launched Twitter’s search page you will get a lot more bang for the buck that you have not paid. Searching now on Twitter.com makes it easy to perform a search and then pop-open a right panel to view more about a particular tweet. It also provides access to the relatively new images and video galleries related to search topics:
It seems as though Twitter has made this move in order to make the appearance of the product more uniform across its various different features. As an example, making a search for singer “Mary J. Blige,” as shown below, reveals the latest in “top tweets” to the fore — vs. all tweets — as well as “top images” and “top videos.” Moreover, you still have the alternative option for looking at all messages about Blige by clicking on the “tweets” tab to the left of the “top” tweets tab.
Searching for new, fresh tweets should be effortless, but older stuff, not so much, according to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, which presents marketing and search engine news.
“One of the big losses with the change is the ability to swiftly go back into time,” he wrote. “With old Twitter Search, you could ‘page back’ or, if you knew how to hack the URL, jump back a few days to see tweets over a short period of time.
With the revision, to see older tweets beyond those initially displayed, you have to keep scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling. That is a pain.
Although, searching on the new search page leads to a page that looks very much like your timeline. The results (on the left) are still as simple and easy to find as they ever were, but the added #NewTwitter column on the right makes things a lot more rich than we have had in the past. Besides, it looks much better and is a little more practical too, as you have faster access to your profile and direct messages.
Nevertheless, it should be a great addition to a tool that we use around TNW at least daily. Also, whatever theme customization has been applied to your Twitter page will now be functional to the search results, so you might want to check to make sure that everything shows up as you would want it to.
With Twitter’s constantly-growing base of users, it is easy to get lost in the information goldmine that they provide. It is not yet clear if Jack Dorsey, who returned to lead the Twitter product team a few months ago, had anything to do with killing off the old search Web page.