Santa Brings Twitter People Search Back!
Published by Rodney Rumford December 23rd, 2008 in twitter.A month ago I wrote about the Twitter people search not working. Then Twitter simply shut it off and you could no longer find it. Well I am happy to report that twitter has brought this functionality back with some improvements.
Search for a username, first or last name. When you search by name it brings back results of people that have that name. It shows their last tweet, number of followers and there is an easy way to follow them immediately from the page. Nice. The results show the people with the most followers on top.
I will say that it does not find people when I think it should. It should know that “rodney rumford” is: rodneyrumford & rumford, yet it does not. Twitter still has some work to do here, but I am glad they brought back the functionality with some result enhancements.
I think that Twitter needs to extend the people search to include keywords from the profile description and also from the content of your tweets. Let’s make a Christmas wish and see if Santa will deliver this to twitter. I think it would be a Christmas miracle if that happened. Perhaps I should follow Santa? Naaah.
Search Results for Santa. Try Santa Claus and notice how the results will be different.
UPDATE: TWITTER LIMITS THE NUMBER OF SEARCHES YOU CAN DO. WTF? After doing approximately 20 different searches, I get this lame message from Twitter. Newsflash to Twitter: I am searching because I want to find people and connect; why in the world would you limit me?
Twitter writes about it on their blog.
Thanks Rodney - I had almost given up on it ever returning. And there are several WTF issues with twitter. I’m sure that in some cases they have what they believe are good reasons for these limits and lack of search functionality, but they sure don’t do a very effective job of communicating.
Hi Rodney! That search limit there sucks if you’re doing a lot of research on different days! Luckily there’s Monittor and Twitority. Do these 2 searches also have limited search limits I wonder? Only way to find out is to test it, which I think I am gonna do!