Member-only story
Twitter Needs to Fix Its DM Search
Thankfully, the company knows it
As a freelance journalist, I rely a lot on Twitter direct messages. I use them to interview sources, chat with acquaintances, network, and gossip. And my DM habits are nothing compared with some journalists I know, who essentially lean on the product as an addendum to email and Slack. Twitter DMs, for a lot of white-collar media workers, are a further diffusion of how we communicate with each other. We are surrounded by messages, coming and going from seemingly a thousand different locations.
But Twitter DMs are missing one critical feature: search. Or, more accurately, content search. In 2019, the company released a DM “search” that can only find users. I can search for messages from “Damon Beres,” but I can’t search for the content of those messages.
According to computer scientists and UX/UI designers I talked to, while public-facing search products like Google and DuckDuckGo have gotten smarter and more accurate in recent years, private search is a different animal. This may be part of the reason why Twitter hasn’t yet implemented a more comprehensive DM search: It’s a labor-intensive endeavor for the company when, clearly, it has plenty to focus on with its public-facing product.
Twitter told me it’s working to improve its DM…
