Twitter has just implemented a massive set of improvements to search, allowing you to search just within tweets of people you follow, autocomplete, and related results including similar hashtags and usernames. These will all help you find what you’re looking for even if you’re unsure of the exact hashtag or someone’s handle.
Today’s updates are already live on Twitter.com, and related search suggestions, autocomplete, and spelling corrections are also now available in Twitter for iPhone and Android. You can try them out now with a search for “Jeremy Lin” which returns his username and the real names of teammates as suggestions, plus a filter for tweets from People You Follow.
Here’s a list of many of improvements:
- Spelling corrections: If you misspell a term, we’ll automatically show results for your intended query.
- Related suggestions: If you search for a topic for which people use multiple terms, we will provide relevant suggestions for terms where the majority of that conversation is happening on Twitter.
- Results with real names and usernames: When you search for a name like ‘Jeremy Lin,’ you’ll see results mentioning that person’s real name and their Twitter account username.
- Results from people you follow: In addition to seeing ‘All’ or ‘Top’ Tweets for your search, you can also now see Tweets about a given topic from only the people you follow when you select the ‘People you follow’ view. Viewing Tweets about a topic from just the people you follow is a great way to find useful information and join the conversation.
The announcement follows along the wave of improvements to the Discover tab, email digests, and Tailored Trends designed to make Twitter about more than just tweeting and reading, but about exploring the world’s real-time consciousness.
While the improvements sound great, they still need some refining. A search for the misspelling “Jeremey Lin” only pulls up the basketball star’s correctly spelled name in the auto-complete until you get to “Jereme” where the misspelling starts. It aslo won’t show him as a related result the way Google’s “Showing results for…” and “did you mean” do. That means users will either have to type slowly and watch for suggestions for these improvements to truly guide them.
We’ll have more analysis soon.
Article courtesy of TechCrunch