photo credit: KapungoTwitter is no secret any more, that is for sure. The growth rate of Twitter has been through the roof, which is both good and bad I guess. It is good because the more the community grows, the more possibilities of interaction and great content exists. On the other hand, the explosion of content requires us to have more advanced filters in place to sift through everything to find what we need. That is where Twitter Search comes in.
http://search.twitter.com is still an extremely overlooked function in Twitter. Today I was part of a roundtable discussion and out of the other 9 individuals at my table, no one else was aware you could even search in Twitter and what the value would be. I use Twitter’s search function on a daily basis, sometimes dozens of times a day to find and filter the information I am looking for. Some days it seems like Twitter Search is more important to me than even the main function of Twitter! In fact, it is not uncommon for me to use Twitter Search before Googling something. Why? Twitter’s content is practically real-time, and even more important to me is that it is user-content focused. By that I mean that I tend to gravitate towards what my peers think are important versus what traditional media sources might filter for me. (NOTE: It is still important to understand your due diligence needed when deciding when a source is creditable.) So if this feature is so great, why do so few people know about it?
For the longest time, Twitter almost “hid” the search feature way at the bottom of the main feed page. Why is a good question, but all I can think is maybe Twitter officials did not think individuals would want to search content. That is just a guess, but knowing how Twitter started so small, it makes sense that was not a top priority (after all, they need to continue focusing on stability of the system). Over the last couple of weeks, they have moved a search box to the right-hand column, which makes it at least more visible to a user. Even more exciting news came out last week that Twitter is going to ramp up their search to dig into links that people tweet, and not just the sole 140 characters, so it can index even more information to produce better search results.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, give Twitter Search a run through. I think you will find a lot of value.
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