Twitter Bolsters Search Function To Stay Relevant Amidst Competition

When its partnership with Google for news search expired July 1, social networking site Twitter did not have any counter plan to pull out the latest tweets for real-time news it is hugely popular for. To revive its search results and improve its search functionality for latest tweets on breaking news, Twitter announced enhancements to the search function on its interface July 6.

This announcement is in line with its move to review the search strategy post Google's exit from the tie-up. In addition, the social networking site takes a continuous effort to make life easier for account holders.

Reports from the PCMag.com indicate that some of Twitter's engineers hinted July 5 that big changes would be made to the search function shortly. And the changes that followed seem to adopt an algorithm that functions in a Google-like manner. While the changes definitely cater to the diverse requirements of users, they are yet to pave way for new trends in the search stream.

The announcement about the changes effected was made in a blog posting on Friday. The posting states that the social networking service provider endeavors to make the search operation simple to discover what is happening in real-time.

The enhancements introduced Friday enable search autocomplete and People you follow search results to Twitter.com. This apart, Twitter users will also receive related query suggestions, spelling corrections and most relevant search results to their updates that make it easy to get the desired results or get close to their desired results.

Search autocomplete throws up likely terms to your search query that is very useful to follow the hashtag. Also, this enables selection of query from the dropdown menu as the query is entered even before you can finish typing it.

To Twitter's credit, the new features and neat display of results are quite good but they do not enable in-depth search in the archive. Though Tweets were available in the archive, any query posted to search within the archive had not been entertained till July 6. Future makeovers to the search function may enable such queries given the social networking site's constant attempts to improve its services.

With search results being tied to a time-bound order, many deep and archival queries may not be entertained for some more time. Twitter may not take long to address this feature given its zest for constant improvement.