Tuesday 26 July 2011

Twitter Search Gets “New Twitter” Look & Feel

For ages, Twitter has operated a standalone Twitter Search site in addition to allowing people to search from within Twitter.com itself. Today, that standalone site has gained a new location and been upgraded to match the Twitter.com search experience.

Previously, Twitter Search was located at http://search.twitter.com. Now, that address leads to http://twitter.com/search, as tweeted by Twitter earlier today. What’s different beyond the URL? The interface.

Searching at Twitter.com makes it easy to perform a search and then pop-open a right panel to view more about a particular tweet. It also provides access to the relatively new images and video galleries related to search topics. To understand more about these features, see our previous in-depth articles:

Twitter Search itself lacked these additional features. Now it has gained them. The experience to doing a search using the dedicated site is the same as searching from your Twitter.com home page. By default, Twitter Search now also shows “Top Tweets” rather than “All Tweets.”

Twitter Search also provide easy access to the advanced search page, which allows for narrowing results down through a variety of options. Oddly, Twitter had rolled out more visibility of that page within Twitter.com a few months ago, but then it silently disappeared.

This article explains more about some of the advanced search options:

One of the big losses with the change is the ability to easily go back into time. With old Twitter Search, you could “page back” or, if you knew how to hack the URL, jump back a few days to see tweets over a short period of time.

With the change, to see older tweets beyond those initially displayed, you have to keep scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling. It’s a pain.

Of course, Twitter itself still only lets you go back about 5-7 days in all. Beyond that, you need to turn to Topsy, which is the only search engine providing deep archive search after the Twitter-Google deal collapsed earlier this month. More about that and archive search tips is below:

Those will long memories will also recall that Twitter Search was born out of its purchase of Summize in 2008. That’s why http://summize.com use to lead to Twitter Search, even after the purchase.

Last year, I believe, Twitter quietly stopped redirecting from summize.com to Twitter Search. Checking today, I was amazed to discover that Twitter failed to renew the summize.com domain at all. Now that domain, with all the old links about Twitter Search pointing at it, are owned by only company that’s simply using a parked page with ads.

Related Topics: Featured | Top News | Twitter: Search

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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