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

See More With Right Panel Support

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:

• The New Twitter & Search, An Illustrated Guide
• Move Over Time Sorting: Twitter Gets “Top Tweets” Search Results

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.”

Advanced Search More Visible

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:

• Twitter Improves “Who To Follow” Results & Gains Advanced Search Page

Still Hard To Find “Old” Tweets

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:

• Google Realtime Search & The Aftermath Of The Google-Twitter Split

Summize Is Long Gone

Those will long memories will also recall that Twitter Search was born out of its purchase of Summize in 2008. That’s why https://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.