Let’s be honest: Searching on Twitter is awful. Twitter for business professionals have often lamented how difficult, inaccurate and downright irritating searching for other users, specific tweets and hashtags can be. Our universal annoyance with Twitter’s search engine has not, however, gone unnoticed. Since the ever-growing social media megastar severed its search engine relationship with Google last summer, Twitter has been trying desperately to make searching easier. Now, new innovations released last week might actually make social media marketing specialists smile.
If you were tweeting late last Friday, you might have noticed a couple of changes in Twitterland. For one, Twitter has gone automatic. Any search engine worth its salt has an autocomplete feature, and now Twitter is just like the big boys at Google and Bing. According to Twitter’s official blog, “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.”
Marketers frustrated with Twitter’s picky spelling matrix will also rejoice with the news that “if you misspell a term, we’ll automatically show results for your intended query,” the blog reports. The new search engine can now also find real people’s names as well as usernames. Yet perhaps the coolest change in the search engine is the addition of “results from people you follow.” This feature produces results of terms, trends and what everyone’s talking about. This little trick could turn out to be a goldmine for analysts and marketers looking to see the popularity of promoted topics and hashtags.
But enough out of us… let’s hear from you. The new Twitter search engine: love it or loathe it? Holler about it in the comments section below!
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