Twitter’s search and discovery update

Twitter’s search and discovery update

Hi Rebecca, I have read your query on what will be the changes that you could expect from the search and discovery features on twitter. This issue was first seen by Twitter’s Engineering Manager Pankaj Gupta. Effective this July 2012, you can now see the changes on the search and discovery features of Twitter. The advantage of these features is that it is now complete and you could be able to browse and search faster on people you follow. You can easily see real-time responses from what is happening now. You also have the option to view only those happenings from the people you follow. Misspelled words or names can be automatically corrected too.

Twitter’s search and discovery update

According to a post in the official blog site of Twitter, the testing on the Twitter Search began in the first quarter of 2009. They began the test in the web interface for a subset of folks. Twitter placed the search box way up close to the top of the page and the results appear on a separate page. The outcome was not good.

The best way to experience Twitter Search is when it is actually part of your usual Twitter experience. So they went back to the drawing board and made changes. They again tested it with a small subset of Twitter users. The new search feature is now positioned in the sidebar of the user’s Twitter home page.

In the modified version, when you do a search, you will not jump to another page rather the relevant tweets will appear immediately where the user would expect it to, right on the home page where tweets appear. This method of experiencing search is inline with Twitter’s simple approach.

When you use search or do search, you are actually asking for any tweets that contain the phrase or word you are interested in at the moment. Twitter Search is an engine for discovering what is currently happening. On April 8, 2015, Twitter announced on their blog site that they will be unplugging the Discover tab.

On February 2, 2016, Twitter announced that they’ll be rolling out a new home timeline to users across 23 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the UK, and the US.