We reported earlier that Twitter is about to change the way search works on the largest micro-blogging service on the planet. And today, we have it here. The company has introduced a completely re-written search functionality, that has auto-complete, Spell Check, related results and other features. Let’s now take a quick look at these new features.
Search Auto-Complete:
This is one of the most impressive feature, which came out with the new Twitter search. For such a large-scale real-time feeds that are coming in, into Twitter, the auto-complete feature for Search results might be difficult. But the development team at Twitter seems to have pulled this off. The autocomplete feature works instantly as your start typing in the search field. But wait, there’s more to this feature. You can now filter out the search results and let Twitter show results only from the people you follow, which can also be termed as Timeline search. Other than this, two other regular search filters are also available, Top tweets or all the tweets.
The autocomplete feature and faster search results were very impressive, and makes us feel like the entire Twitter search is running on our local machine!
Spelling Correction
The new Twitter search also features spelling corrections. You type a misspelt word in the search box, and Twitter is going to correct the spelling in the background, and display the results for the correct spelling instead of the one you keyed in.
Related Search
Related Search suggestions were one other feature I liked in the new Twitter Search. The service now gives a related search term in addition to the search query you put in! For example, if you key in apple in the search term, if now shows related search queries like apple inc, apple store, steve jobs, itunes, etc. This would let the user know what other terms could help them find the content they are looking for. I personally liked this feature though.
Results with Real and User Names
This was a bit confusing for me. The Twitter blog said that when you search for a name, its going to be showing results from both the username of Twitter as well as the person name. I was really not able to get the point here, even after searching Twitter for Phil Schiller. The results were pretty much the same as it was previously!
New People You Follow tab
As mentioned earlier, this is more of a Timeline Search, that comes with a lot of Twitter mobile and desktop applications. The feature lets you streamline your search results only from the people you’re following on Twitter. This comes in addition to the two filters that were already present, the all and the top filters.
Our Thoughts
Overall, these improvements to the Twitter search are exciting. And we should say that the team has really pulled off the entire search to a new level. We’re sure this search would get refined even further in the future. And there’s a lot of space to bring in some more feature to the Twitter search and also for the entire platform itself!