New Twitter search experience revealed: includes autocomplete, Spelling corrections, related suggestions and more

As promised last night, Twitter has dropped a brand new search experience on its service to help you find things that really matter to you.

Here’s what Frost Li, an engineer on the Search and Relevance team at Twitter had to say about it:

We’re constantly working to make Twitter search the simplest way to discover what’s happening in real time. To that end, today we’re introducing search autocomplete and ‘People you follow’ search results to twitter.com. In addition to recent improvements like related query suggestions, spelling corrections and more relevant search results, these updates make it even easier to immediately get closer to the things you care about.

The search experience on Twitter has always been a sore spot, especially since there is so much content to parse through, without an idea of what’s trustworthy and worth your time, and what’s just noise.

According to the post, the company has focused on a few areas to clean up the experience and make it more streamlined.

With autocomplete, you’ll now find an experience similar to the one you’d see on Google, where you’ll get suggested terms as you start typing. A dropdown will appear and let you choose an option.

Also, if you spell something wrong, Twitter will now automatically show results for the right spelling. In addition, “related suggestions” will start popping up so if you’re searching for the Broncos, you’ll get suggestions for other things to search on, like the NFL.

In the department of finding dependable and trustworthy content, when you search for someone like Jeremy Lin, you’ll see people referring to his real name and his username. No longer do you have to perform searches for both, which is a huge timesaver.

We’ve been seeing “top” and “all” tweet options when performing searches for a while now, which is helpful, but today Twitter has announced that you’ll be able to dig into topics based on tweets from the people you follow, in its very own view.

Being able to search through your friend’s tweets only is something we’ve all been waiting many many years for, and I’m stoked to be able to give it a try. It’s like having a search engine for your friends right at your fingertips.

All in all, this is a step in the right direction for Twitter and discoverability on its platform. It has been very difficult for new users to jump into the service by finding things that are relevant to them and the handful of people that they follow. This should fix that onboarding problem, as well as cut out the noise for the rest of us.

The autocomplete and spell correction features will be rolled out for Twitter’s mobile apps as well. Want to see what the new search experience is all about? Go check out our hands-on.