Social search has been a hot topic over the last few years. With the amount and speed of content being propagated on these types of sites, being able to navigate effectively through such a breadth of potentially valuable data was valid interest.
And with Google+ being the first to release a high functionality social search engine, social network titan Twitter has also had to focus on improving the way they handle search queries.
Twitter’s latest update primarily focused on upgrading the functionality of their search options and returning more intelligent results to search queries. We examine some of the more prominent updates below.
Autocomplete
It’s not exactly the most exciting or novel feature to add to your search functionality, but an essential one nonetheless.
Autocomplete tries to guess your search query before you finish typing it, basing its guesses on trending or popular topics. This comes in the form of a drop down menu of guesses that appear just below the query being typed, with the most likely guess appearing in light grey as part of the query.
This can be quite useful if a person only knows part of the event or account’s name.
Enhanced Filters
Once you’ve gotten the results from your query, you’ll now be able to further filter the results to only show one’s from twitter profiles you’re currently following with the ‘People you follow’ filter tab.
The goal of this is to keep the Twitter experience social and personal, similar to the Facebook model. It becomes increasingly important as content overload becomes a concern with the immense growth of Twitter activity.
This won’t however available for Twitter on Android and iPhones
Some Other Exciting Updates
• Spelling corrections – For queries, that returns a ‘Did you mean:’ cue with the results for misspelt or less popular terms. This is based on current search trends, past search behaviour and common sense.
• Related suggestions – Based on current trends or topical similarities with your search results.
• Name search in tweets- If you type in a twitter user’s name or username, search results will results will return tweets mentioning them or their username. So you can find out not only what they’re saying, but what’s being said about them. Not available on Android or iPhone.