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Twitter announce new ‘Omnisearch’ feature [@SmartInsights Alert]

Author's avatar By Robert Allen 11 May, 2016
Essential Essential topic

Omnisearch will let Twitter 'provide search as a service'

Importance: [rating=2] (For Social Media Managers)
Recomended source: Twitter's blog

Twitter's dev team have been rather busy of late. They've refreshed the Home timeline to highlight the best Tweets first, introduced tailored content via Highlights for Android, and personalized the search results and trends pages. This, of course, is all in response to lackluster Follower growth and losing market share to competitors like Facebook and Instagram, which, unlike Twitter, sort their content via an algorithm which predicts what users will want to see.

Twitter is sticking with the reverse chronological feed because, after all, that's what makes Twitter Twitter. But because of the obvious popularity of algorithmically curated content, it is going to be showing more and more content based on relevancy to the user, rather than just what happened to be the last thing Tweeted.

Twitter research

To effectively decide which Tweets users will want to see, Twitter is building a new system called 'Omnisearch'. This will let Twitter's search function perform more intelligently, and let users search for things they can't currently specify at the moment, like only surfacing Tweets with gifs in for example. You may also be able to search Periscope broadcasts, 'moments' or Vines. In Twitter's own words, they want Omnisearch to let Twitter 'provide search as a service, allowing us to build entirely new kinds of products'.

Nothing has gone live with Omnisearch as of yet, as it is still in development. But expect to see big changes to Twitter when it does roll it out. We'll update you when it does.

Author's avatar

By Robert Allen

Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.

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