Twitter said on Wednesday that its direct message search function has been significantly enhanced — it can now scan the content of your chats and return individual messages that include the phrase you enter. Previously, you could only use it to search for people’s names or the names of group chats, but now you can just put “chilli” into the search box to discover that one conversation you had with a buddy about “chilli.”
Of course, searching for specific people or conversations remains possible, and you can even choose whether you want to view results for individuals, groups, or messages – useful if the term you’re looking for happens to be someone’s name.’
This shift has been long overdue. When Twitter launched direct message search on Android in May 2021, the company stated that content search will follow later that year. Although Twitter appears to have missed that deadline slightly, the search is now available on all platforms – the initial search was available on iOS for over two years before Twitter brought it to Android.
When I tested it out for myself, the enhanced search appeared to function on both the web and the iOS and Android applications. While it can search relatively ancient texts, it does not appear to search them all – it retrieved results from 2020, but not from 2019 or prior. (It’s worth mentioning that searches for people’s names also appeared to go back that far.)
