Twitter Has Eliminated People Search. Good Luck Finding People.
13 Comments Published by Rodney Rumford November 22nd, 2008 in twitter.I wrote about a month ago about how something was fishy with twitter people search functionality. Twitter had “temporarily” disabled this feature. Well it looks like twitter people search has gone from temporarily disabled to permanently eliminated. Poof. Gone. I noticed the elimination of the people search feature Friday in the early morning and thought that it was odd that no one else had said anything.
The entire people search feature is now gone. The only way for you to find people on twitter quickly is if you have their email. Why a social network would eliminate such a core feature of allowing people to connect based u[upon a search feature is very strange. The really adds a major point of friction for finding people you want to find by name. Why twitter would do this is a bit confusing to me.
I would suspect that somehow they are going to integrate the search technology that they acquired when they purchased summize a number of months back. We will just have to wait and see what they do next. Twitter has not written a single blog post about what is happening here.
So in the meantime all you can do is try to import your email list of contact. Even this feature is not reliable and crashes when you have several hundred contacts that you are trying to start following.
13 Responses to “Twitter Has Eliminated People Search. Good Luck Finding People.”
- 1 Pingback on Dec 23rd, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I’ve imported everyone I’d want in my e-mail list to Twitter. I don’t want anymore from that. I would like to be able to find people by name or geographic location or even interest, and no People Search is no help here.
Rodney:
Bummer. I used the People Search feature (and not the one with e-mail) a couple of times a day until they suspended it several weeks ago.
Know what I do now? I use Google — and it’s usually pretty good. Type “Rodney Rumford + Twitter” and watch what comes up. Yes, it’s a pain to have to do this in a separate tab, but hey: It generally gets me what I’m looking for.
Bryan Person | @BryanPerson
LiveWorld
Hey Rodney – I noticed the missing tab, too. I had been to a local meet-up the night before and was looking for a few folks there on Twitter. This has been my new favorite way to keep connected to the new geeks I meet. Don’t have to deal with a business card and more social than a forced e-mail. Not sure the little bird understands just how disruptive he can be.
You are so right. This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I found a lot of people on Twitter using that search function – either by name or by topic. If someone has a word in their bio that tells me we would be a good connection I’d like to find them that way.
I’m hoping that they are putting that function into search.twitter.com. I’ve got my fingers crossed.
There is an alternative to get close to a Twitter People Search. I have modified a Google Search to make a passable alternative. Check it out on my blog:
http://ekive.blogspot.com/2008/11/twitter-eliminates-people-search-here.html
Sounds like an opportunity for someone else to develop a twitter search app. Tweetdeck is a good candidate. Have you noticed how they now have Twitscoop, keyword/search tracking built in eliminating the need to visit Summize (oops search.twitter.) Plus you can even find out when someone joined twitter off of tweetdeck by clicking on their name and seeing their profile.
Isn’t this done because of all the spammers on Twitter? I can imagine that without the People Search it becomes less easy for spammers to follow you.
Since Twitter disabled people search a few weeks ago, we’ve seen a steady increase up to a few hundred people searches a day at http://tweetscan.com/usersearch.php
We’ve currently indexed about 100k of the most recently active users and if you give it a try I’m sure you’ll find many of the folks you’re looking for. If you have any feedback to offer, do contact @weex or @tweetscan or just tweet about it.
Thwirl searches people just fine!
I can’t believe it either! I haven’t looked at the feature in a while anyway because it was never working. I looked the other day and couldn’t find it! I’m surprised. In fact, I would think there would be an even more advanced search capability that can include location and other key words from profiles.
Thanks for confirming that I wasn’t going crazy that it had disappeared!
I am so very MAD at Twitter for this! And I LOVE Twitter…
Like you I have been “waiting pateintly” for months now for the search feature to be back.. and today, hopeful as always, I went to check only to find it GONE!!
WHy oh WHy? This was more than a useful feature.. it is necessary for my Twitter use! I knopw I wrote them, and I can only encourage others to do the same. You can go to help and then submit a request demanding a search feature to be installed again!
Bad Twitter.. bad bad!
Twitter people search was very useful tool. Its pathetic that twitter disabled the functionality.
I looked for alternatives and found some great tools. A compilation of 30 alternatives to twitter search can be found at http://smartadvise.info/alternatives-to-twitter-search/
I find these tools are better choice than twitter people search