Twitter upgrades its DM search to finally make it useful

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By Oliver Haslam
published

Twitter
Twitter (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • Twitter has enabled a feature that allows people to search the content of their direct messages.
  • Direct message search previously only applied to people's names or the name of the DM thread.
  • Twitter's new search improvement is available across iOS and the web now.

Twitter has given its DM search feature a big upgrade by making it capable of finding text within messages for the first time.

With the previous implementation searching for a DM, the search feature was only capable of finding the name of a person or the name of a group, something that made the feature almost useless. Now, Twitter lets people find the content of a message which is something people are most likely to be trying to do when searching.

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Tests show that this feature now works across the iOS app and website, allowing people to search for text that is within a message in a way that simply wasn't possible beforehand.

We know you've been waiting for the option to search your DMs…Now you can use the search bar in your inbox to find specific messages using keywords and names.

It's a mystery as to why it's taken Twitter so long to get the feature out the door but it's very much a welcome one. A ton of people use Twitter direct messages as a kind of instant messaging platform, one reason why searching messages is such an important feature. Now that it's here, maybe using the official Twitter app will make a little more sense for some.

As great as this new feature is, however, many wouldn't consider the official Twitter app to be the best iPhone solution for actually using the service. Improvements like this certainly won't hurt. though.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.