Twitter on Friday rolled out a new smarter search engine that brings with it an autocomplete feature along with the ability to guess whether you are searching for a term or a person. The Twitter search program can also search within the list of people a Twitter user follows.
On Thursday night Twitter teased that its search and discovery feature was about to change “forever” and now its new features have been shown off for both Twitter mobile and Twitter.com users.
The first new feature is the companies’s auto-complete. According to Twitter engineer Frost Li:
“Search autocomplete shows you the most likely terms for your query as you enter it — especially useful if you’re trying to follow the hashtag for an event or you’re looking for a certain Twitter account. You can select your query from the drop-down menu even before you finish typing it.”
The new autocomplete feature will also fix spelling mistakes for more accurate search results.
The next feature includes a better search understanding for related terms, hashtags and account searching. According to Li:
“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.”
The final new feature involves optimizing Twitter searches. For example after your search is completed you can narrow the search down only people you follow if you want a narrow search. This final feature could be huge for brands.
Do you think Twitter’s new search features are useful for your own search needs?
