Besides the app, what else has Twitter been cooking up for mobile? Well, for what seems like forever, Twitter has been developing advanced search filters for mobile, which will provide a range of new filter options to help better your Twitter discovery experience. Up to now, the most mind-boggling thing is how Twitter – a primarily mobile-oriented app – hasn’t really worked on its ‘mobile’ aspect? Another scenario of making ‘poor life decisions’? Who knows? 

On-The-Go Spyglass

Take a look at these screenshots. No, really, they basically sum up this article. Posted by Social Media expert Matt Navarra, Twitter’s mobile advanced search will supply users with a range of new qualifiers, including: 

  • Accounts mentioned

  • Data ranges

  • Mentions

  • Hashtags

  • Like and Retweet counts

All of these are, supposedly, already built into the app and are available in the Advanced Search tab on desktop, which you can access by clicking on the ‘Advanced Search’ link in the search box after having conducted a keyword search. That’s on desktop; on mobile, you have a slightly different tale – you can use them, but you basically need a working understanding of Boolean search parameters to maximize the use and utility of these additional qualifiers. 

Navarra further notes that you’ll also be able to use these additional search parameters when conducting a Tweet search on individual user profiles, which could help you find specific Tweets from specific people during a specific time, specifically. Wow, now wasn’t that specific? Twitter is long overdue for an improvement of its in-app search functions, which has been highly requested for years now. 

Chief Twit Elon Musk has vowed to improve in-app search, among many other add-on requests. As noted, Twitter has been working on potential improvements over the last few weeks; what we’re seeing now is the first example of a working prototype, and it’ll be interesting to see if and when it actually makes it into the live environment. With Musk’s ‘hardcore engineering’ approach, one good thing that came from it is the small delay between testing and implementation, so perhaps now would be the best time to try out as many Twitter experiments as they can afford.

The Wrap

Once fully fleshed out, it could prove to be a valuable addition to your Twitter process and the entire Twitter experience as a whole. The platform has long been plagued by weak discovery elements. The sooner Twitter can address this and figure out its search X factor, the sooner it can start making up for everything that it has lost. While fixing search won’t make Twitter #1, it’ll at least make it that much more viable. 

Sources 

https://bit.ly/3Is5kJu