Twitter beefs up search function

Twitter has added a brand new search experience on its microblogging site to help users find things that really matter to them. In May, Twitter added spelling corrections and related queries alongside its search results. Now the company has introduced two more search features to make querying its real-time torrent of tweets more effective. Twitter engineer Frost Li said in a blog post that these updates make it even easier to immediately get closer to the things you care about. “We’re constantly working to make Twitter search the simplest way to discover what’s happening in real time,” said Li. “To that end, today we’re introducing search autocomplete and ‘People you follow’ search results to twitter.com. In addition to recent improvements like related query suggestions, spelling corrections and more relevant search results, these updates make it even easier to immediately get closer to the things you care about.” Search autocomplete should be familiar 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. Also, if you spell something wrong, Twitter will now automatically show results for the right spelling. Twitter’s autocomplete displays suggested terms or phrases in a dropdown menu, along with Twitter account names that match. “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. Twitter claims to have more than 140 million active users who post more than one billion tweets every three days, with the largest number being in the US. Currently, one billion unique Google searches are performed daily, with Google being the website with the most traffic in the world. Facebook is second and Twitter stands at ninth. There is one area in particular where Twitter could challenge Google — paid advertising and, in particular, mobile advertising where Facebook has struggled. Since these internet sites have become so crucial to how we find information and how we communicate, Twitter’s changes could turn out to be the start of a something new and big. Technology pundits have predicted the site could make its content discovery system look a lot more like Flipboard, the popular social magazine app. The autocomplete and spell correction features will be rolled out for Twitter’s mobile apps as well as on its website. From gulfnews