It may not be the sexiest update Twitter has made, but its search functionality was reinvigorated on Friday afternoon. You know how when you used to search for “heirlom tomatoes” the only thing that came back was tweets from other misspellers. Among other improvements, the new search will now correct your spelling to what it deduces you might be looking for. Of course, feel free to search for fellow heirlom-ers, and good luck with your garden.
In addition to correcting spelling errors, Twitter’s blog points toward improvements in being able to search terms within only the people you follow and results for people searches that come back with real names and Twitter handles. The blog also highlights:
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.
The functionality probably won’t bend the minds of, say anyone who has used a search engine in the past 2-3 years, but still it’s nice to have everyone’s favorite micro-blog addiction keeping up with the Joneses. The Wall Street Journal points out the big upshot for Twitter: cash-money, greenbacks, bread, dough, lettuce, scrilla, duckets.
If Twitter’s more than 140 million active monthly users conduct more searches on the service, the company also has a chance to show many more ads, and therefore juice its revenue. On many Twitter searches, the company serves up a very visible “promoted tweet”–what regular folks might call an ad–at the top of the search results.
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