New Twitter Update: You can look for specific messages on the DM search bar

Twitter has announced that users can now use the search bar in their inbox to look for specific messages using keywords and names. “Now you can search for really important things in your DMs,” the company notes.

As you can see in the image above, Twitter has changed its DM search options so that you can now filter your queries into four groups:

1. All: In this case, you will see all of the results for your search, including username and key term matchups.
2. People – Shows usernames that match your search term.
3. Groups – Shows group chats that have your search term in them.
4. Messages – This now shows any keywords that were used in specific DMs.

Previously, you could only use the search bar to look for the names of people or group chats, but now you can search for a conversation you had with a contact about “vegetables,” “barbeque,” or “beef stew” by typing it into the search bar.

The old-fashioned method of searching for names of individuals or conversations is still available, and you can even choose whether you want to view results for people, groups, or messages, which is particularly useful if the term you’re looking for happens to be someone’s name.

It’s been a long time coming for this to happen. In May 2021, Twitter announced that content search will be coming to Android later that year. For some reason, Twitter appears to have missed that deadline, but at least it’s available on every platform—the original search was available on iOS for over two years before Twitter introduced it to Android.

I was able to use the enhanced search both on the web and on my mobile devices running Android OS. When I searched for messages from 2020, it didn’t turn up anything from 2019 or earlier, despite the fact that it can search pretty old messages. Also worth mentioning is that trying to search for people’s names only appeared to go back that far as well.

No one knows why it took Twitter so long to roll out the feature, but it’s an upgrade that will be well appreciated. People use Twitter DM as a kind of instant messaging platform, which is one of the reasons why searching for messages is such an important feature on the platform. Now that it’s available, it’s possible that some people will find it more convenient to use the official Twitter app.