It can now find keywords, not just names.
Twitter announced on Wednesday that its DM search feature has gotten a big upgrade โ it can now search through the content of your conversations and return specific messages that contain whatever keyword you type in. Before you could only use it to search for peopleโs names or the names of group chats, but now if you want to find that one conversation you had with a friend about โchiliโ you can just type it into the search bar.
Of course, searching for person or conversation names still works, and you can even decide whether you want to see results for people, groups, or messages โ handy if the keyword youโre trying to search happens to be someoneโs name.
We know youโve been waiting for the option to search your DMsโฆ
Now you can use the search bar in your inbox to find specific messages using keywords and names. pic.twitter.com/A41G8Y45QI
โ Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 23, 2022
This change has been a long time coming. When Twitter brought DM search to Android in May 2021, it said that content search was coming later that year. The company seems to have missed that deadline by a bit, but at least itโs available on every platform โ the original search was available on iOS for almost two years before Twitter added it to Android.
Testing it out myself, the improved search seemed to work on the web, as well as the iOS and Android apps. While it can search reasonably old messages, it doesnโt seem to search all of them โ it dug up results from 2020, but on my account it didnโt include any results from 2019 or earlier. (Itโs worth noting that attempts to search for peopleโs names also seemed to only look back that far as well.)